Memories and Portraits, excl. A Humble Remonstrance

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Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Other: Andrew Lang
Release Date: December 4, 2009 [EBook #30598]
Language: English
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THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME IX
_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
Copies are for sale._
_This is No._ ........
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF NOTE FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF R. L. S.
[_See also overleaf._]]
[Illustration]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME NINE
LONDON : PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS : IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED : WILLIAM
HEINEMANN : AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
PAGE
I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 7
II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES 19
III. OLD MORTALITY 26
IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 36
V. AN OLD SCOTS GARDENER 46
VI. PASTORAL 53
VII. THE MANSE 61
VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 68
IX. THOMAS STEVENSON 75
X. TALK AND TALKERS: I. 81
XI. TALK AND TALKERS: II. 94
XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 105
XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED 116
XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S 124
XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 134
XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 148
MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Jenkins of Stowting--Fleeming's grandfather--Mrs. Buckner's
fortune--Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets
King Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career--The
Campbell-Jacksons--Fleeming's mother--Fleeming's uncle John 165
CHAPTER II
1833-1851
Birth and childhood--Edinburgh--Frankfort-on-the-Main--Paris--The
Revolution of 1848--The Insurrection--Flight to Italy--Sympathy
with Italy--The insurrection in Genoa--A student in Genoa--The
lad and his mother 184
CHAPTER III
1851-1858
Return to England--Fleeming at Fairbairn's--Experience in a
strike--Dr. Bell and Greek architecture--The Gaskells--Fleeming
at Greenwich--The Austins--Fleeming and the Austins--His
engagement--Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson 203
CHAPTER IV
1859-1868
Fleeming's marriage--His married life--Professional
difficulties--Life at Claygate--Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin--and
of Fleeming--Appointment to the Chair at Edinburgh 220
CHAPTER V
Notes of Telegraph Voyages, 1858-1873 231
CHAPTER VI
1869-1885
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 260
CHAPTER VII
1875-1885
Mrs. Jenkin's illness--Captain Jenkin--The golden wedding--Death
of Uncle John--Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin--Illness and death
of the Captain--Death of Mrs. Jenkin--Effect on
Fleeming--Telpherage--The end 293
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
TO
MY MOTHER
IN THE NAME OF PAST JOY
AND PRESENT SORROW
I DEDICATE
THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
_SS. "Ludgate Hill,"
within sight of Cape Race_
_NOTE_
_This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to
read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A
certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth,
portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle,--taken
together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost
awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I
had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the
charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and
when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to
appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be
surprised at the occurrence._
_My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental
youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the
person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret; not because I love him
better, but because with him I am still in a business partnership, and
cannot divide interests._
_Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in
"The Cornhill," "Longman's," "Scribner," "The English Illustrated," "The
Magazine of Art," "The Contemporary Review"; three are here in print for
the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may be regarded as
a private circulation._
_R. L. S._
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
I
THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
"This is no' my ain house;
I ken by the biggin' o't."
Two recent books,[1] one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by
the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people
thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should
arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United
Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many
different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts,
from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the
Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the
seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race
that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate
the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish
mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but
the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in
Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking
woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the
most of North America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India,
along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan,
is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying
stages of transition. You may go all over the States, and--setting aside
the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or
Chinese--you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as
in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in
the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has gone
round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our
fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality
of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local custom and prejudice,
even local religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the
nineteenth century--_imperia in imperio_, foreign things at home.
In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours
is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a domineering nature,
steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick
about the life of others. In French colonies, and still more in the
Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between
the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is
begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life
easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and
ignorance. He figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the
same disdainful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for
some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon
his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he
will never condescend to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an
authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of
Japan to be uneatable--a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of
Wales's marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese,
it was proposed to give them solid English fare--roast beef and plum
pudding, and no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic
folly. We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the
chance, will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit
inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands of
miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance
of the religions they were trying to supplant.
I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is
better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr.
Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He
wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco.
He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in
America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of
which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a
term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a
subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his book a vast
virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view
partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper,
at the largest, to a clique of States; and the whole scope and
atmosphere not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in
reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to their
cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness
of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look when I find
myself in company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to
him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example
were better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible
to Mr. White than Boston to the English, and the New England
self-sufficiency no better justified than the Britannic.
It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most
ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States;
he is probably ignorant of India, but, considering his opportunities, he
is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one
country, for instance--its frontier not so far from London, its people
closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the
English--of which I will go bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the
sister kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by
anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good
intelligence--a University man, as the phrase goes--a man, besides, who
had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we
live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London;
among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice
he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things
were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter
of law." He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be
informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me
roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained
to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the
brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked
me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a
monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the
experience of Scots.
England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in
education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always
widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant
White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt
ourselves foreigners on many common provocations.[2]
A Scotsman may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States,
and never again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and
strange lands and manners as on his first excursion into England. The
change from a hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted
wonder. Along the flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers
of churches. He sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the
windmill sails. He may go where he pleases in the future; he may see
Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure
of that moment. There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of
many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody
country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant busyness,
making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air,
gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance
into the tamest landscape. When the Scottish child sees them first he
falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep
turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree, with every feature of
the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets;
the green, settled, ancient look of the country; the lush hedgerows,
stiles, and privy pathways in the fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers;
chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding
English speech--they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to
English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The
sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is blunted, but I doubt
whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more
rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been long
accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens
the sense of isolation.
One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotsman's eye--the
domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,
venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all. We
have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country
places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood
has been sparingly used in their construction; the window-frames are
sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are
steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and
permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of
cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotsman
never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these
brick houses--rickles of brick, as he might call them--or on one of
these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is,
and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. "This is no' my ain
house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is his own, bought
with his own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it
has not yet been, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his
imagination; nor does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and
breadth of his native country, there was no building even distantly
resembling it.
But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,
insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own
long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or
two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It seems
incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should
have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold
our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with
a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with
less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like
a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too much,
and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction. Yet
surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is too
often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often
withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind
evaded as with terror. A Scottish peasant will talk more liberally out
of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational
counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one
interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotsman is vain, interested
in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts
and experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is
self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in
Scotland or the Scots, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does
not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and
being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you
continue to associate, he would rather be reminded of your baser origin.
Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour,
the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest.
That you should continually try to establish human and serious
relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and
desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something
more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the
attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of
the educated English towers over a Scotsman by the head and shoulders.
Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scottish and English youth
begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up
those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and,
to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in
both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once
rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a
greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy,
and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy
of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself
to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily
transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind
and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a
less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in
present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are
younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and
perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scottish boyhood--days of
great stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth
of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter
Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The
typical English Sunday, with a huge midday dinner and the plethoric
afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of
the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two
divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first
questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What
is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with,
"What is the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, "To
glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol
of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked
opens to us Scots a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is
asked of all of us, from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly
together. No Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would
have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight
for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days
kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material
conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying
everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the
black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities,
imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level streets, the
warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the
architecture, among which English children begin to grow up and come to
themselves in life. As the stage of the University approaches, the
contrast becomes more express. The English lad goes to Oxford or
Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic
life, costumed, disciplined, and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be
regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege
besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his
compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly
different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a
bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the
public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has
been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and
nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the
exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All
classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman
in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie
from the parish school. They separate, at the session's end, one to
smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the labours of
the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class
in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,
fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment,
ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the
sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think,
that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting these
uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human geniality.
Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in
while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is always a
juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study
the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our
tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming,
lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the
college gates, in the glare of the shop-windows, under the green glimmer
of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in
wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of
the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday, _la trêve
de Dieu_.
Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his
country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and
from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying
iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery
mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in
song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories
in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of
oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids.
Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of
the legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland
have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish
history--Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five--were still either failures
or defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the
Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a
moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small,
the mere taproot of her extended empire; Scotland, again, which alone
the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of
that, and avowedly cold, sterile, and unpopulous. It is not so for
nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater
readiness of sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing,
like his own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of
boyish romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error
serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the
heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of
number and Spartan poverty of life.
So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter
Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed
in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply marked
within the borders of Scotland itself than between the countries.
Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet
you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove
to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the Highlander
wore a different costume, spoke a different language, worshipped in
another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social
constitution from his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.
Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the
Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scots. Yet
the Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the
Scottish lowlands; but his courage failed him at the border, and he
regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When the Black Watch,
after years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped
out and kissed the earth at Portpatrick. They had been in Ireland,
stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well
liked and treated with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that
they kissed, at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people
who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and
hanged them since the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious,
the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of Europe.
They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not English,
but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their
minds when they thus, in thought, identified themselves with their
ancestral enemies? What was the sense in which they were Scottish and
not English, or Scottish and not Irish? Can a bare name be thus
influential on the minds and affections of men, and a political
aggregation blind them to the nature of facts? The story of the Austrian
Empire would seem to answer No; the far more galling business of Ireland
clinches the negative from nearer home. Is it common education, common
morals, a common language, or a common faith, that join men into
nations? There were practically none of these in the case we are
considering.
The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, the
Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.
When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's necks in spirit; even
at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk. But from his
compatriot in the South the Lowlander stands consciously apart. He has
had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his will in
other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home
in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to
remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the
Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scots accent of the mind.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 1881.
[2] The previous pages, from the opening of this essay down to
"provocations," are reprinted from the original edition of 1881; in
the reprints of which they still stand. In the Edinburgh Edition
they were omitted, and the essay began with "A Scotsman."--ED.
II
SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
I am asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to
the profit and glory of my _Alma Mater_;[3] and the fact is I seem to be
in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am
willing enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one
point I see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the
University itself and my own days under its shadow; of the things that
are still the same and of those that are already changed: such talk, in
short, as would pass naturally between a student of to-day and one of
yesterday, supposing them to meet and grow confidential.
The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; more
swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so
that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time
and the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last
year's case-book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it
near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I
began to think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found
it, mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that
posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is likely,
with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less welcome; but
I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more
emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a
praiser of things past.
For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has
doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by
gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it
does; and, what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased
to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very
best of _Alma Mater_; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more
strange), had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and
do not die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have
befallen my successors of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of
advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that,
on a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the
most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,
unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the
whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes of good,
flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, morning
journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable
gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my
college life. You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him; his
virtues, I make sure, are inconceivable to his successors, just as they
were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically
alone in the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how
much he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun)
seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune and
dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went. And it may
be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their season, and
that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth in
particular are things but of a moment. So this student, whom I have in
my eye, took his full share of these concerns, and that very largely by
his own fault; but he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst of
much misconduct, kept on in his own way learning how to work; and at
last, to his wonder, escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly
shamed; leaving behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good
deal of its interest for myself.
But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is by no
means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-day, if
they knew what they had lost, would regret also. They have still Tait,
to be sure--long may they have him!--and they have still Tait's
class-room, cupola and all; but think of what a different place it was
when this youth of mine (at least on roll days) would be present on the
benches, and, at the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior[4] was
airing his robust old age. It is possible my successors may have never
even heard of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a link snapped with the
last century. He had something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and
plain; he spoke with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire;
his reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with
post-chaises--a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire on the
Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own grandfather. Thus he
was for me a mirror of things perished; it was only in his memory that I
could see the huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream to leeward,
and the watchers, as they fed the fire, lay hold unscorched of the
windward bars of the furnace; it was only thus that I could see my
grandfather driving swiftly in a gig along the seaboard road from
Pittenweem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, drawing up to speak
good-humouredly with those he met. And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone
also; inhabits only the memories of other men, till these shall follow
him; and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his.
To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a
prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man
filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set-offs. But they
cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that
Professor Kelland is dead. No man's education is complete or truly
liberal who knew not Kelland. There were unutterable lessons in the mere
sight of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a
fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of
that very kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class
time, though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in
out-of-the-way English parishes when he was young; thus playing the same
part as Lindsay--the part of the surviving memory, signalling out of the
dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished things. But it
was a part that scarce became him; he somehow lacked the means: for all
his silver hair and worn face, he was not truly old; and he had too much
of the unrest and petulant fire of youth, and too much invincible
innocence of mind, to play the veteran well. The time to measure him
best, to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he
received his class at home. What a pretty simplicity would he then show,
trying to amuse us like children with toys; and what an engaging
nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed!
Truly, he made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed,
but at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious,
troubled elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us. A theorist
has held the view that there is no feature in man so tell-tale as his
spectacles; that the mouth may be compressed and the brow smoothed
artificially, but the sheen of the barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it
must have been thus with Kelland; for as I still fancy I behold him
frisking actively about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem
to see most clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection. I
never knew but one other man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so
kind a spectacle, and that was Dr. Appleton.[5] But the light in his
case was tempered and passive; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and
flashed vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to
goodwill.
I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.
Kelland's class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of
merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although I am
the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor's own hand, I
cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class above a dozen
times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once)
while in the very act of writing the document above referred to, that he
did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting
upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me
a great deal of trouble to put in exercise--perhaps as much as would
have taught me Greek--and sent me forth into the world and the
profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they
say it is always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is
its own reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon this
I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more
deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less education.
One consequence, however, of my system is that I have much less to say
of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; and as he is still
alive, and will long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not surprise
you very much that I have no intention of saying it.
Meanwhile, how many others have gone--Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not
who besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng the arch
and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest
parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their
fathers in their "resting-graves"! And again, how many of these last
have not found their way there, all too early, through the stress of
education! That was one thing, at least, from which my truantry
protected me. I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be
sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I know the name of that branch of
knowledge which is worth acquiring at the price of a brain fever. There
are many sordid tragedies in the life of the student, above all if he be
poor, or drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than
the case of the lad who is in too much hurry to be learned. And so, for
the sake of a moral at the end, I will call up one more figure, and have
done. A student, ambitious of success by that hot, intemperate manner of
study that now grows so common, read night and day for an examination.
As he went on, the task became more easy to him, sleep was more easily
banished, his brain grew hot and clear and more capacious, the necessary
knowledge daily fuller and more orderly. It came to the eve of the
trial, and he watched all night in his high chamber, reviewing what he
knew, and already secure of success. His window looked eastward, and
being (as I said) high up, and the house itself standing on a hill,
commanded a view over dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last my
student drew up his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked
abroad. Day was breaking, the east was tinging with strange fires, the
clouds breaking up for the coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless
terror seized upon his mind. He was sane, his senses were undisturbed;
he saw clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and knew that it was
normal; but he could neither bear to see it nor find the strength to
look away, and fled in panic from his chamber into the enclosure of the
street. In the cool air and silence, and among the sleeping houses, his
strength was renewed. Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had
passed, and an abject fear of its return.
"Gallo canente, spes redit,
Aegris salus refunditur,
Lapsis fides revertitur,"
as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office. But to him that
good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had brought panic,
and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook to think of. He
dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat; he sat down, he rose
up, he wandered; the city woke about him with its cheerful bustle, the
sun climbed overhead; and still he grew but the more absorbed in the
distress of his recollection and the fear of his past fear. At the
appointed hour he came to the door of the place of examination; but when
he was asked, he had forgotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, they
had not the heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted
him, still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He could
only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all,
his mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day and his own
intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing in a brain fever.
People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent
reason; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of
the mind as fell on this young man. We all have by our bedsides the box
of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but when a
young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is
playing with the lock.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] For the "Book" of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair, 1886.
[4] Professor Tait's laboratory assistant.
[5] Charles Edward Appleton, D.C.L., Fellow of St. John's College,
Oxford, founder and first editor of the _Academy_: born 1841, died
1879.
III
OLD MORTALITY
I
There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison,
on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep
cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of
the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long.
The aisles are lined with the enclosed sepulchres of families, door
beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadows of
the prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves.
There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant
incidents are woven with my memory of the place. I here made friends
with a certain plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely
cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped
about his youth like winter sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel
once, for some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and
kept my wild heart flying; and once--she possibly remembers--the wise
Eugenia followed me to that austere enclosure. Her hair came down, and
in the shelter of a tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the
braid. But for the most part I went there solitary, and, with
irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name after
name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle dates: a
regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and had
thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room,
wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that whole crew of the
silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a picture; and
he, with his comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in
scarlet, and in his day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, like
a taunt, among that company of phantom appellations. It was possible,
then, to leave behind us something more explicit than these severe,
monotonous, and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a
painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly
more desirable than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed
beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the
housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the
fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the sea.
And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David
Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's
dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own
nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and
grey tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk
among the tombs of spirits: and it is only in the course of years, and
after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to
see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own
for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street,
and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the
meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple,
the sweet whiff of chloroform--for there, on the most thoughtless, the
pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of
man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his
ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go
again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be
still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.
The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken
gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of
a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet
here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard
alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the
memorials of the dead.
Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon
their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy
of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to
excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity
of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in
that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding
the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits
us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to
his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he
should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to
Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a
grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count
"Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more
pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism.
But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann.
And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I
began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was
weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was
day-spring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to
see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and
modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally
from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I remember to have
observed two working women with a baby halting by a grave; there was
something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child,
the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles
under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I
overheard their judgment on that wonder: "Eh! what extravagance!" To a
youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and
pregnant saying appeared merely base.
My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was
unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red
evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral,
told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his
labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey;
and, in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season
of the year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others
whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung
about them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had engagements to
keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with
mankind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there was
no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on
spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well
to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide
the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and
dates. It would be "in fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened, for
"Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their past patients--familiarly
but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a
servant, whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright
table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe
beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the
burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a
superficial touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he
attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is
on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton
differs from the Scottish. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his years
of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride
common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor
even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the
shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be
something different from human if his solitary open-air and tragic
labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil
isle, apart from city clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient
effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his
contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall,
he counts them; and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps
appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly
influence of habit grows to be his pride and pleasure. There are many
common stories telling how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But
I will rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose
unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage
built into the wall of the churchyard; and through a bull's-eye pane
above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the
upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Moderate; 'tis
certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of death-bed
dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived beyond man's
natural years, that his life had been easy and reputable, that his
family had all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now
behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the majority. The
grave-digger heard him out; then he raised himself up on one elbow, and
with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his
lifelong labours. "Doctor," he said, "I hae laid three hunner and
fower-score in that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull," indicating
Heaven, "I would hae likit weel to hae made out the fower hunner." But
it was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part
to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry him.
II
I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground
of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave,
is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he
sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague
epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is
all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire
unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to
be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable,
and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant
Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his
truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad, and gather
flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no
longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice
or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a
power that wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn
compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet storing up.
The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble
fallibility. When we have fallen through story after story of our vanity
and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin
to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our
own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others, and
still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in
with the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf
the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that
at the last, when such a pin falls out--when there vanishes in the least
breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for
our supply--when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the
faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with
those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to
memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace
of our life.
III
One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us
labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most
serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint
thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great
gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student
gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw
him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies; we
loved his notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than
when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked
among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds
of a most influential life.
The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back,
I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow
of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding,
urbanity, and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our
friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent, and inhumane;
and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry demolish honest sentiment. I
can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit
streets, "Là ci darem la mano" on his lips, a noble figure of a youth,
but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere
on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony, and
his self-respect miserably went down.
From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore,
bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had
deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there
was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body
he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed
resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He
returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth;
lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable;
at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him
down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready, but
with a kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that
unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low.
Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great
while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his
last step gentle, urbane, and with the will to smile.
The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him,
the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but
himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to
think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his
instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of
remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and
pointed with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him
then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over
whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we
gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the
rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear
and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts
that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we
disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of
his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently
awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; and to see
him there, so gentle, patient, brave, and pious, oppressed but not cast
down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to
pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our
wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to
fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly _abandon_, like one who
condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for
a kingdom. Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own
disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they
repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.
But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: _mene, mene_; and
condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough; had
earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to murmur.
Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength;
but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had
betrayed him--"for our strength is weakness"--he began to blossom and
bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore
thrown down before the great deliverer. We
"in the vast cathedral leave him;
God accept him,
Christ receive him!"
IV
If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the
irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these
foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the
difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the
heroes of defeat.
I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place; pause,
with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A
pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and
an ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a
reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example;
and, in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of
the dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the
valley of humiliation;--of whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had
the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you,
that in former times men have met with angels here, have found pearls
here, and have in this place found the words of life."
IV
A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
I
All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the
pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end,
which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one
to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I
saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either
read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note
down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus
I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it
was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished
to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I
would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I
practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with
myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any
one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and
country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also;
often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played
many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations
from memory.
This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried
to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school
of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the
most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught
me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less
intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and
the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come
by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set
me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as
there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever
I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a
thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was
either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I
must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was
unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again
unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts
I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the
co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt,
to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to
Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these
monkey tricks, which was called "The Vanity of Morals": it was to have
had a second part, "The Vanity of Knowledge"; and as I had neither
morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was
never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for
recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first
in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast
on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas
Browne. So with my other works: "Cain," an epic, was (save the mark!) an
imitation of "Sordello": "Robin Hood," a tale in verse, took an eclectic
middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer, and Morris: in
_Monmouth_, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my
innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first
draft of _The King's Pardon_, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no less a
man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with
staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of
course conceived my fable in a less serious vein--for it was not
Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought
to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the
inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of "The Book of
Snobs." So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and
down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were
not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas,
but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another
hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the
other, originally known as _Semiramis: a Tragedy_, I have observed on
bookstalls under the _alias_ of "Prince Otto." But enough has been said
to show by what arts of impersonation and in what purely ventriloquial
efforts I first saw my words on paper.
That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have
profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was
never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we
could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival
of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier
and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: "But this is not
the way to be original!" It is not; nor is there any way but to be born
so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this
training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be
none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike
Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have
tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a
prime force in letters: he was of all men the most imitative.
Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It
is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers, it is
almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless
exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the
considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the
student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose
and preserve a fitting key of language, he should long have practised
the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that
he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens
of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself
knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's
ability) able to do it.
And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines
beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he
please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very
true saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have
had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own
performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I
could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them
even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I
must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain
with me. "Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why
you do lyrics so badly." No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way
of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These
were returned; and I was not surprised or even pained. If they had not
been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there
was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked
at--well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on
learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the
occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in
print, and to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of
the public.
II
The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted
among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant,
Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an
accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of
the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with
pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like
some goodly dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in
their wire cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table,
many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a
former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read;
here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks
askance at these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect
on the whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned
mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt of
dead lions than all the living dogs of the professoriate.
I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very
humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for;
yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I
was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and, in particular, proud of
being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were
then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name
on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential
in the law courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been
reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that
battle of life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They
were all three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most
conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a
reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to
one of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill
fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the _Comédie Humaine_.
He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of which I
write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to
heaven next day in the _Courant_, and the day after was dashed lower
than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the _Scotsman_. Report would
have it (I daresay very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he
particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its
truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a
pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a
boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely
tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he
took flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk
of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years
thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed, always in good
hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of his
manner may have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners are
very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood; and
to explain the miracle of his continued existence, I must fall back upon
the theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same
kind, "there was a suffering relative in the background." From this
genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me
out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I
best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking
quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer;
smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow
with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick,
with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with singular deliberation
and, to a patient listener, excellent effect. After all these ups and
downs, he seemed still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to
breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of
his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had
set himself to found the strangest thing in our society: one of those
periodical sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions;
in which young gentlemen from the Universities are encouraged, at so
much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations, and calumniate
private individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a
man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod;
and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for
Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as
they did the other day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works,
as I hope you have just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon
some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a
favourite slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his
own life that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his
paper single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic;
up early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily
ear-wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and doubtless
ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems
there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his
paper died after him; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it
must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing.
These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the
mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary.
We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor
thing to come into the world at all and leave no more behind one than
Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less; and
this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in
a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old,
graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of _Alma Mater_
(which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without
haggling, for some pence--this book may alone preserve a memory of James
Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.
Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they were
all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to them, and
made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and
hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active
brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers
of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University
building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four
were to be conjunct editors, and, what was the main point of the
concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of
arithmetic--that flatterer of credulity--the adventure must succeed and
bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that
morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three
distinguished students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my
first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my
fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not
withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart,
I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not be
worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; and I
kept wondering how I should be able, upon my compact income of twelve
pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It
was a comfortable thought to me that I had a father.
The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it,
for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed
obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all
four of us with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the
hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been
a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be
still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked
so hopefully in the Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that
might have gone to print a "Shakespeare" on, and was instead so clumsily
defaced with nonsense! And, shall I say, Poor Editors? I cannot pity
myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the
wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into
half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a
copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged,
and who did all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact,
passed over the gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will
not say that I was pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any
chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that I thought the
better of her taste. I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had
the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid
over my share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who
rubbed their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than
formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise
with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I
told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to
work I went again with my penny version-books, having fallen back in one
day from the printed author to the manuscript student.
III
From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers.
The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to
straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains
invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would print the
thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of
its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent
and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume of
Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand
alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and Robert
drew very close together in their lives; for John was rough--he smelt of
the windy brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the
hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the
two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the old Adam that pleases
men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he was a wayfarer besides,
and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and however Robert's
profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man
of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to
recast a piece of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a
maturer touch. And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other
country two such men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet of
some twenty cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill.
V
AN OLD SCOTS GARDENER
I think I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the
uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the south-western hills there
may yet linger a decrepit representative of this bygone good fellowship;
but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life
who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew
Fairservice,--though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence
could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern
flower-plots. There was a dignity about his tall, stooping form, and an
earnestness in his wrinkled face, that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don
Quixote who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been
nourished in his youth on "Walker's Lives" and "The Hind let Loose."
Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this
as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the
infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so difficult to tell
the little that I know, he stands essentially as a _genius loci_. It is
impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden
in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its
shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from
the north-west corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of
each other. When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make
him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best
that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but
to me it will be ever impotent.
The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he
had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking-horse. Latterly he
was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the
parish register worth all the reasons in the world. "_I am old and well
stricken in years_," he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold
enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over
all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a
gardener. He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and
reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry
figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days.
He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity. He told of
places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were
meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad
shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was
condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. You were
thrown at once into an invidious position. You felt that you were
profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will
consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with
the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen
who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen
Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical,
for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your
garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge,
throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile
section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in
supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of
your own artichokes, "_That I wull, mem_," he would say, "_with
pleesure, for it is mair blessed to give than to receive_." Ay, and
even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer
our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad,
professing that "_our wull was his pleesure_," but yet reminding us that
he would do it "_with feelin's_,"--even then, I say, the triumphant
master felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance
only, that he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and
that the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit
of the unworthy takes."
In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting
sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses, and holding in supreme
aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned, or wild. There was one
exception to this sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on
the last count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shrubbery
was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his
bill in order to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as he told me
once, speaking in that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned
common folk can use nowadays, his heart grew "_proud_" within him when
he came on a burn-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with
their graceful trophies; and not all his apprenticeship and practice for
so many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish
recollections from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the
beauty of all that was bygone. He abounded in old stories of his
boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures, and when he
went (on a holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth
where he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite
reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have
shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.
But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking
for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers
together. They were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments
for ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his cauliflowers and peas
and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His preference for the more useful
growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-plots, and
an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. He
would prelect over some thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling
reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.
Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed,
raised "_finer o' them_"; but it seemed that no one else had been
favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were mere
foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with
perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so-and-so had wondered, and
such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his
rivals only that he parted praise and blame. If you remarked how well a
plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with
solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the
other hand, you called his attention to some back-going vegetable, he
would quote Scripture: "_Paul may plant, and Apollos may water_"; all
blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or
untimely frosts.
There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his
favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the bee-hive. Their
sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had taken hold
of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot
say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to him by some
recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood. Nevertheless, he
was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal
dignity to mingle in any active office towards them. But he could stand
by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest
that it was quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the
cries of the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a
man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the
bees for text. "_They are indeed wonderfu' creatures, mem_," he said
once. "_They just mind me o' what the Queen of Sheba said to
Solomon--and I think she said it wi' a sigh,--'The half of it hath not
been told unto me.'_"
As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old Covenanters,
of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth was full of sacred
quotations; it was the book that he had studied most and thought upon
most deeply. To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns,
are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding
themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the
very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap
educational series. This was Robert's position. All day long he had
dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew
poetry and Gospel ethics; until they had struck deep root into his
heart, and the very expressions had become a part of him; so that he
rarely spoke without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave
a raciness to the merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of the
Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and
ready store of reference. He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love:
he interposed between man and wife: he threw himself between the angry,
touching his hat the while with all the ceremony of an usher. He
protected the birds from everybody but himself, seeing, I suppose, a
great difference between official execution and wanton sport. His
mistress telling him one day to put some ferns into his master's
particular corner, and adding, "Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't
deserve them, for he wouldn't help me to gather them," "_Eh, mem_,"
replied Robert, "_but I wouldna say that, for I think he's just a most
deservin' gentleman_." Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate
terms, and accustomed to use language to each other somewhat without the
bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position of a
seat in the garden. The discussion, as was usual when these two were at
it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides. Every one accustomed
to such controversies several times a day was quietly enjoying this
prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit--every one but Robert, to whom the
perfect good faith of the whole quarrel seemed unquestionable, and who,
after having waited till his conscience would suffer him to wait no
more, and till he expected every moment that the disputants would fall
to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: "_Eh,
but, gentlemen, I wad hae nae mair words about it!_" One thing was
noticeable about Robert's religion: it was neither dogmatic nor
sectarian. He never expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the
doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned anybody else. I have no
doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as
considerably out of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy;
and the natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about
Free-Churchism; but, at least, he never talked about these views, never
grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the belief or
practice of anybody. Now all this is not generally characteristic of
Scots piety; Scots sects being churches militant with a vengeance, and
Scots believers perpetual crusaders the one against the other, and
missionaries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert's originally tender
heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and
pleasant labour among fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny
creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and
the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,
"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade."
But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of
his innocent and living piety. I had meant to tell of his cottage, with
the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that
he had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically: "_He
was real pleased wi' it at first, but I think he's got a kind o' tired
o' it now_"--the son being then a man of about forty. But I will let all
these pass. "'Tis more significant: he's dead." The earth, that he had
digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the
flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new
and nearer way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to
honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour
of its kind: "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and yet not
one of them falleth to the ground."
Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death to
greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the haughty
Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant
of God.
VI
PASTORAL
To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but to leave it when years have come only casts a more
endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr.
Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly
the central features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new
impression only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of
native places. So may some cadet of Royal Écossais or the Albany
Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer
marching his company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the
soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the
remembered aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in
particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for
Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one
of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers
about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of
Scotland are incomparable in themselves--or I am only the more Scottish
to suppose so--and their sound and colour dwell for ever in the memory.
How often and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or
Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the bright
burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks in the den
behind Kingussie! I think shame to leave out one of these enchantresses,
but the list would grow too long if I remembered all; only I may not
forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for
all its pollutions, that Water of Leith of the many and well-named
mills--Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn
of pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless
trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from
Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss under the
Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a rock, where I
loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in its infancy
by subterranean pipes for the service of the sea-beholding city in the
plain. From many points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole
course and that of all its tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput
may visit all its corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be
breathed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent
cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it
would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland
sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river;
it would take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the
most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the
sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain _genius loci_, I am
condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (who
cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would
gladly carry the reader along with me.
John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the
Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering,
sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when the
drove-roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were
thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched flocks into England,
sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a
rough business, not without danger. The drove-roads lay apart from
habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea
fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the
one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes
were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of
which offences had a moorland burial, and were never heard of in the
courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked,--by
two men after his watch,--and at least once, betrayed by his habitual
anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic
prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more
heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter
places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the
inroads of pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to
wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by
snatches; in the grey of the summer morning, and already from far up the
hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his shoutings; and in
the lambing-time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This
wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the
Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which
men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part he was
at first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural
abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only
by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot
amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this ogre;
I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the Killing
Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing
dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities: his hail at sight
of me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met
but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the calumet with
the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the
ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone
in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me
a cry" over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and
for me to overtake and bear him company.
That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in
ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honeyed,
friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He
laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw,
hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was
permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like
a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain, and a threat of latent
anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and
harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of
Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a
surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with
new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master,
stalking a little before me, "beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging
loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding
me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men
of his trade. I might count him with the best talkers; only that talking
Scots and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing
at least but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you;
when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing
took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans
of sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the
yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionately thinned and
strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the
weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of
sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he could present so
humanly, and with so much old experience and living gusto, that
weariness was excluded. And in the midst he would suddenly straighten
his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the
sharp thunder of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so
that you saw at last the use of that great wealth of names for every
knowe and howe upon the hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with
lowered tails and raised faces, would run up their flags again to the
masthead and spread themselves upon the indicated circuit. It used to
fill me with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story.
But John denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the constant
butt of his passion and contempt; it was just possible to work with the
like of them, he said,--not more than possible. And then he would expand
upon the subject of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one
really good dog that he had himself possessed. He had been offered forty
pounds for it; but a good collie was worth more than that, more than
anything, to a "herd"; he did the herd's work for him. "As for the like
of them!" he would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of
his assistants.
Once--I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born
_Britannis in montibus_, indeed, but alas! _inerudito saeculo_--once, in
the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on
the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach
to John, and a slur upon the dog; and both were alive to their
misfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had
found a pair of sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask for
restitution. But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights.
"How were they marked?" he asked; and since John had bought right and
left from many sellers, and had no notion of the marks--"Very well,"
said the farmer, "then it's only right that I should keep
them."--"Well," said John, "it's a fact that I canna tell the sheep; but
if my dog can, will ye let me have them?" The farmer was honest as well
as hard, and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he
had all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's
dog into the midst. That hairy man of business knew his errand well; he
knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their shame) lost
them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the Lord knows how, unless
by listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery; and
without pause or blunder singled out, first one and then the other, the
two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and
refused. And the shepherd and his dog--what do I say? the true shepherd
and his man--set off together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and
"smiled to ither" all the way home, with the two recovered ones before
them. So far, so good; but intelligence may be abused. The dog, as he is
by little man's inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in
virtue; and John had another collie tale of quite a different
complexion. At the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton,
wise men say) there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for
washing sheep. John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he
was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the
deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog; knew him
for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant farm; one whom
perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully steering flocks to
market. But what did the practitioner so far from home? and why this
guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the pool?--for it was towards the
pool that he was heading. John lay the closer under his bush, and
presently saw the dog come forth upon the margin, look all about to see
if he were anywhere observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himself over
head and ears, and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike
homeward over the hills. That same night word was sent his master, and
the rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence
before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for alas!
he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; and it was
from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so far to cleanse
himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton.
A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life,
in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it
ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or
written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that
writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who
reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have
never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors
rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine
_dilettante_, but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to
speak of parlours and shades of manner and still-born niceties of
motive, and begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death, or
childbirth; and thus ancient out-door crafts and occupations, whether
Mr. Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the
scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged
things have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much
to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal
taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of
the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost
art which was once the fashion of an empire; and those only are
perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that roused men in all
epochs of the past. There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution
but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a certain
low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees,
next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see
squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his
berries--his wife, that accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his
name I never heard, but he is often described as Probably Arboreal,
which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but
at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run
some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still
tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have
moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.
We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I had
one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. But yet I think I owe
my taste for that hillside business rather to the art and interest of
John Todd. He it was that made it live for me as the artist can make all
things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep
upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy
aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I
never weary of recalling to mind; the shadow of the night darkening on
the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow-shower moving here and there
like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black
dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly
harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centre-piece to all these
features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain's
eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of
bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I
still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not
far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking
hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile,
standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch
of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.
VII
THE MANSE
I have named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty
Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the
choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain
water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for
the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and
darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold;
and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill
just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black
heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many
other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was
when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife,
have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it
must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the
point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be
exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb
to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as
low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may
be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds;--and the
year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the river-side I may find
the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged.
It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces
by a great hedge of beech, and overlooked by the church and the terrace
of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall
"spunkies" might be seen to dance, at least by children; flower-plots
lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a
pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with
an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water everywhere, and the
sound of mills--the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain;
the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods
pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the
midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish
stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I
supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is
difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of
stalwart sons and tall daughters was housed and reared, and came to man
and woman-hood, in that nest of little chambers; so that the face of the
earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with
outlandish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of
the little chambers brightened with the wonders of the East. The dullest
could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign
places: a well-beloved house--its image fondly dwelt on by many
travellers.
Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him,
judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as a
man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the
display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a lover of
his life and innocent habits to the end. We children admired him: partly
for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are
concerned for beauty, and above all for beauty in the old; partly for
the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all
observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I
now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with
a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons
or letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a
library of bloodless books--or so they seemed in those days, although I
have some of them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read
them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our
imaginations. But the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian
pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for
I have no such passions now) the greed with which I beheld them; and
when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went,
quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that,
if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture.
"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will
He slumber that thee keeps,"
it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to
set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a
task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must suppose the
old man thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the
performance; for he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness,
and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that,
for that day, we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception
into so tender a surprise that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed
the hope was one of those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with
no design upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my
grandfather should strip himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts
and reminders of his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he
should bestow it upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving
all that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the
rod in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young.
The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had
over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the end of
his many days. He sat by the dining-room fire, with his white hair, pale
face, and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given
him a dose of our good old Scots medicine, Dr. Gregory's powder. Now
that remedy, as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have
a savour of romance for the imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the
palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being
accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching a
"barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in her
hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered at once. I
had had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar kiss: so he
decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming
opportunely to the kitchen door--for such was our unlordly fashion--I
was taken for the last time from the presence of my grandfather.
Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must
suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I,
though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them.
He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it
in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the
quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have
been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also and am persuaded
I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made
embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never
made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of
knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it.
He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better
with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had
chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may possibly
inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try
as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all
the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my
blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and
centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love
of mills--or had I an ancestor a miller?--and a kindness for the
neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry--or
had I an ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played
himself?--for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me
played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green
avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still
a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed,
perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet
thought upon; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its
site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener's. All this I
had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I
have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our
first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of
Burns's Dr. Smith--"Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at
first hand.
And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this _homunculus_ or
part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.
Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other _homunculi_ or
part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower
order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to
college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking
down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron;--we may have had a
rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain carpenter in I
know not what wynd of the old smoky city; or, upon some holiday
excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a
flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his shuttle. And these
were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; and from the eyes of the
lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn father, and one-quarter of
myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college. Nothing of all this
would cross the mind of the young student, as he posted up the Bridges
with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scots
still unadulterated. It would not cross his mind that he should have a
daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not
unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a
grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; and
some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year or two
longer in the person of their child.
But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy;
and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
backward the careers of our _homunculi_ and be reminded of our antenatal
lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at
Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of
letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St.
Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the
great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and
shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a West
India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie's, and
managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I was with my
engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he
sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us "The
Pirate" and "The Lord of the Isles"; I was with him, too, on the Bell
Rock, in the fog, when the _Smeaton_ had drifted from her moorings, and
the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he
must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible
words; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe,"
and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat
unmoved reading in his Bible--or affecting to read--till one after
another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes,
parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them
well. And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up
can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of
ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly
preferable) system of descent by females, fleërs from before the legions
of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldæan
plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see
peering through the disparted branches? What sleeper in green tree-tops,
what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal in his
habits....
And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with
me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in
his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an
aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories,
like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts
awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be
distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the
old divine.
VIII
MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET
Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their
recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and
scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a
buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on
the playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which
cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,
the little sun-bright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye
with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. _Glück und unglück
wird gesang_, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to
wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to
fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.
One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used one
but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, where I once
waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on
both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an
island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer's day, hearkening to the
shearers at work in riverside fields and to the drums of the grey old
garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And this was, I think, done
rightly: the place was rightly peopled--and now belongs not to me but to
my puppets--for a time at least. In time, perhaps, the puppets will
grow faint; the original memory swim up instant as ever; and I shall
once more lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it
is in nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in
butterburrs; and wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that
memory; and be pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire
to weave it into art.
There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me.
I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later on, threw upon
its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its
tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet faded; the
sound of the sentences is still in my mind's ear; and I am under a spell
to write of that island again.
I
The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner of the
Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which you may see
the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the other, where you
shall be able to mark on a clear surfy day the breakers running white on
many sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first remember seeing it, framed
in the round bull's-eye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its
shores like the waters of a lake, the colourless, clear light of the
early morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood
upon it, in those days, a single rude house of uncemented stones,
approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it
was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely
withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of
peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of
the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores
of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole,
sounding as we went; and, having taken stock of all possible
accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of operations.
For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse steamer to anchor
in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to seaward, a certain black
rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran
reefs. Here was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, for the conduct
of seamen. But as the rock was small, and hard of access, and far from
land, the work would be one of years; and my father was now looking for
a shore station where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men
live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor.
I saw Earraid next from the stern-thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough
and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a
beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold! there was now a pier
of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a
street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden
bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put
together experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the
hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her
moorings. All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking
tools; and even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern
to and fro, in the dark settlement, and could light the pipe of any
midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday,
when the sound of the tools ceased, and there fell a crystal quiet. All
about the green compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday's best,
walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully
smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening
to the wailing of the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath
services, held, as they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner
reading at a table, and the congregation perched about in the double
tier of sleeping-bunks; and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the
chapters," the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent
lighthouse prayer.
In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed
to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the
very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More,
the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the
great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a
brace of wallowing stone-lighters. The open ocean widened upon either
board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon,
before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where
the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron
barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes
waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the
mid-sea. An ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant
assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might
play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the
Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with
an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect
between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of
sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race and
growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the
calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. Times were
different upon Dhu Heartach when it blew, and the night fell dark, and
the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and
the men sat prisoned high up in their iron drum, that then resounded
with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat with them in their
sea-beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in anxious faces when
some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and
sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr.
Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of
undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human
minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that
I saw Dhu Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer
afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an
enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo,
riding in her wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she
rose on the long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.
II
But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse
settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the top of the
first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face
of things unchanged by any of man's doings. Here was no living presence,
save for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, grey, rain-beaten ram
that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the
haunting and the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was
found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's
priests. The earthy savour of the bog plants, the rude disorder of the
boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and
the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden
springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the
isle,--all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt
with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past ages.
"Delightful would it be to me to be in _Uchd Ailiun_
On the pinnacle of a rock,
That I might often see
The face of the ocean;
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
Upon the rocks:
At times at work without compulsion--
This would be delightful;
At times plucking dulse from the rocks;
At times at fishing."
So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred
years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid.
And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and
sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were roaring
for days together on French battle-fields; and I would sit in my isle (I
call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the
loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men's wounds,
and the weariness of their marching. And I would think too of that other
war which is as old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man; the
unsparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of seventy
years, dear-bought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls,
and the poor rewards. It was a long look forward; the future summoned me
as with trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and
beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a
childish bather on the beach.
There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much
together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat and
spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most
part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures;
wondering together what should there befall us; hearing with surprise
the sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As far, and
as hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems
now to look backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that
loath submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our
necks under the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the other
day; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon my part, I
was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so composed and
sedentary in the world; and how much we had gained, and how much we had
lost, to attain to that composure; and which had been upon the whole our
best estate: when we sat there prating sensibly like men of some
experience, or when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a
western islet.
IX
THOMAS STEVENSON
CIVIL ENGINEER
The death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the general
reader. His service to mankind took on forms of which the public knows
little and understands less. He came seldom to London, and then only as
a task, remaining always a stranger and a convinced provincial; putting
up for years at the same hotel where his father had gone before him;
faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same church, and the same
theatre, chosen simply for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine
out. He had a circle of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more
beloved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and
wherever he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his
strange, humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him
up friends and admirers. But to the general public and the world of
London, except about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained
unknown. All the time, his lights were in every part of the world,
guiding the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers to the Indian,
the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh
was a world-centre for that branch of applied science; in Germany, he
had been called "the Nestor of lighthouse illumination"; even in France,
where his claims were long denied, he was at last, on the occasion of
the late Exposition, recognised and medalled. And to show by one
instance the inverted nature of his reputation, comparatively small at
home, yet filling the world, a friend of mine was this winter on a
visit to the Spanish main, and was asked by a Peruvian if he "knew Mr.
Stevenson the author, because his works were much esteemed in Peru." My
friend supposed the reference was to the writer of tales; but the
Peruvian had never heard of "Dr. Jekyll"; what he had in his eye, what
was esteemed in Peru, were the volumes of the engineer.
Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818; the grandson of
Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, son of
Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that his nephew, David
Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of his death in the
engineership, is the sixth of the family who has held, successively or
conjointly, that office. The Bell Rock, his father's great triumph, was
finished before he was born; but he served under his brother Alan in the
building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and,
in conjunction with his brother David, he added two--the Chickens and
Dhu Heartach--to that small number of man's extreme outposts in the
ocean. Of shore lights, the two brothers last named erected no fewer
than twenty-seven; of beacons,[6] about twenty-five. Many harbours were
successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief disaster
of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved too strong for man's
arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale
hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in
that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-o'-Groat's. In the
improvement of rivers the brothers were likewise in a large way of
practice over both England and Scotland, nor had any British engineer
anything approaching their experience.
It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my
father's scientific inquiries and inventions centred; these proceeded
from, and acted back upon, his daily business. Thus it was as a harbour
engineer that he became interested in the propagation and reduction of
waves; a difficult subject, in regard to which he has left behind him
much suggestive matter and some valuable approximate results. Storms
were his sworn adversaries, and it was through the study of storms that
he approached that of meteorology at large. Many who knew him not
otherwise, knew--perhaps have in their gardens--his louvre-boarded
screen for instruments. But the great achievement of his life was, of
course, in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination. Fresnel had
done much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle
that still seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and
brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not unnatural
jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France. It had its hour;
and, as I have told already, even in France it has blown by. Had it not,
it would have mattered the less, since all through his life my father
continued to justify his claim by fresh advances. New apparatus for
lights in new situations was continually being designed with the same
unwearied search after perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means; and
though the holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most
elegant contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much
later condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications. The
number and the value of these improvements entitle their author to the
name of one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the world a safer
landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be said: and, first, that
Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, a sentiment
of optical laws, and a great intensity of consideration, led him to just
conclusions; but to calculate the necessary formulæ for the instruments
he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help
of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate friend,
_emeritus_ Professor Swan,[7] of St. Andrews, and his later friend,
Professor P. G. Tait. It is a curious enough circumstance, and a great
encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped should have
succeeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks of applied
science. The second remark is one that applies to the whole family, and
only particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the great number and
importance of his inventions: holding as the Stevensons did a Government
appointment, they regarded their original work as something due already
to the nation, and none of them has ever taken out a patent. It is
another cause of the comparative obscurity of the name; for a patent not
only brings in money, it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father's
instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are passed
anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least considerable
patent would stand out and tell its author's story.
But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, what
we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion. He was a man
of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that
was wholly Scottish, and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound
essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the
most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately
attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults
of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life's
troubles. Yet he was a wise adviser; many men, and these not
inconsiderable, took counsel with him habitually. "I sat at his feet,"
writes one of these, "when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow
was set in thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that
no man could add to the worth of the conclusion." He had excellent
taste, though whimsical and partial; collected old furniture and
delighted specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Oscar
Wilde; took a lasting pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout
admirer of Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared the taste;
and though he read little, was constant to his favourite books. He had
never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had left
school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say, for
Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors. The first
he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, keeping it near him
in his study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys. Another old
theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in his hands. When he was
indisposed, he had two books, "Guy Mannering" and "The Parent's
Assistant," of which he never wearied. He was a strong Conservative, or,
as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; except in so far as his views
were modified by a hot-headed chivalrous sentiment for women. He was
actually in favour of a marriage law under which any woman might have a
divorce for the asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same
sentiment found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh,
founded and largely supported by himself. This was but one of the many
channels of his public generosity; his private was equally unstrained.
The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a
sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited
often by his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own
unworthiness, he would never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice
was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees. What he
perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the defence
of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchison
Stirling and reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.
His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, too,
were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for death.
He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his own character;
and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy.
Cases of conscience were sometimes grievous to him, and that delicate
employment of a scientific witness cost him many qualms. But he found
respite from these troublesome humours in his work, in his lifelong
study of natural science, in the society of those he loved, and in his
daily walks, which now would carry him far into the country with some
congenial friend, and now keep him dangling about the town from one old
book-shop to another, and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog
that passed. His talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much
freakish humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic,
was a perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to
settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and picturesque;
and when at the beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of
this power, it was strange and painful to hear him reject one word after
another as inadequate, and at length desist from the search and leave
his phrase unfinished rather than finish it without propriety. It was
perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions,
passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found
the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger,
and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what
we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in
spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a
happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at the last
came to him unaware.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw
_sub voce_ Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be
defined as "a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted."
[7] William Swan, LL. D., Professor of Natural Philosophy in the
University of St. Andrews, 1859-80: born 1818, died 1894.
X
TALK AND TALKERS
Sir, we had a good talk.--JOHNSON.
As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle
silence.--FRANKLIN.
I
There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,
gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an
illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of
time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international
congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public
errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by
day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament
but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no
book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance.
Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good
talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life,
freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking,
comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,
tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while written
words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden
dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the
truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can
only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and
may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of
the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely æsthetic or
merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug
is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary
groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like
schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our
period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak;
that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the
harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of
pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our
education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any
age and in almost any state of health.
The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind
of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot,
we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a
fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power
of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and
women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival
mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports
of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All
sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and
selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or
heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has
the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and
hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among
friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.
It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy
that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of
relations and the sport of life.
A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company, and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the
quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not
that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and
more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of
conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying
where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is
rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing
prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing
in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol or follow
it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and
so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be
reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are
other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.
Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal
lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument;
asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and
opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the
admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of
ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the
vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay
ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we
swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once
launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower
up to the height of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out
for the heroes, brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their most
shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with
words and for a while inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and
theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast
with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes
his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds
of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a
moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the _entr'acte_ of an
afternoon performance, coming forth into the sunshine in a beautiful
green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the
music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate _The
Flying Dutchman_ (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful
sense of life, warmth, well-being and pride; and the noises of the city,
voices, bells, and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a
symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk
lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within
you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming around
you with the colours of the sunset.
Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,
rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience,
anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the
whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter
in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental
elevation and abasement--these are the material with which talk is
fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is
proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should
proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should
keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses
of men, at the level where history, fiction, and experience intersect
and illuminate each other. I am I, and you are you, with all my heart;
but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when,
instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit
housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to
corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the change
when we leave off to speak of generalities--the bad, the good, the
miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus--and call up other men, by
anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature; or, trading on a
common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the
hues of life. Communication is no longer by words, but by the instancing
of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of
history, in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken
in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified,
change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without
effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a
large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to
the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon,
Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can
leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.
Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that
embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for
their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically
human; and even these can only be discussed among their devotees. A
technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in athletics, art,
or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on technicalities from such
rare and happy persons as both know and love their business. No human
being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes
me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded
as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the
weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in
language, and far more human both in import and suggestion, than the
stable features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds and the people
generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often
excitingly presented in literature. But the tendency of all living talk
draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity. Talk is a
creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last
resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of
gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip,
because it turns on personalities. You can keep no men long, nor
Scotsmen at all, off moral or theological discussion. These are to all
the world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities;
the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which
they express their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together
daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in
cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet
scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects--theology and love.
And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines would
have granted their premisses or welcomed their conclusions.
Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise,
and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any
subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time,
however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,
conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an
exploration. A point arises; the question takes a problematical, a
baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively
presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive
with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first
utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a
shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold
they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's
cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of
joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life
of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far
apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth;
and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.
There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to
fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable
man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain
proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable
adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen
questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be
instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on
equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for
without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach
it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein
pleasure lies.
The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd
Jack.[8] I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely
the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth
man necessary to compound a salad is a madman to mix it: Jack is that
madman. I know not which is more remarkable: the insane lucidity of his
conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of
method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject
treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles
like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,
transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling
of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and
flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror.
It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack
it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality, and
such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence.
In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with
moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing
to compare with the vigour of these impersonations, the strange scale of
language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major
Dyngwell--
"As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument--"
the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence, and bathos,
each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder
of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging
to the same school, is Burly.[9] Burly is a man of a great presence; he
commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of
character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could
be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been
said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical
inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of
talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you
down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of
revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both
conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and
the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in
these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end
arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves
to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout
there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear
although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet
concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend
debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of
transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and
then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two
favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues
that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we
love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot,
in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full
measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat
from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard
adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an
enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery, and manners of its
own; live a life apart, more arduous, active, and glowing than any real
existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a
theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the
chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the far
finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated
poetry, Burly the romantic prose of similar themes; the one glances high
like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many
changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but
both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched
ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of
contradiction.
Cockshot[10] is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has
been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry,
brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point
about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound
nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have one
instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in
your presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I _should_
have some theory for that." A blither spectacle than the vigour with
which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by
a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas,
as an athlete bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort. He
has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic
gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the
thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in
these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable
even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy--as when idle
people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour's
diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours
of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable wit and
spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. He
knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of
talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a
thorough "glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his
adversary. Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.
Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable
quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred,[11] on the
other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat
slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to
shine in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a
refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw
it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often
instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as
well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal
he has his hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by
accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally,
they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and
humour. There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into
the very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the
words next his skin, and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of
particular good things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as
the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often
enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; and, between us, on
this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known
him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it
in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life
with humorous or grave intention, and all the while never hurrying, nor
flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given
moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly
just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts
is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet
slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating
but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with his doubts.
Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion
studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against his
will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and
poetic talk of Opalstein.[12] His various and exotic knowledge, complete
although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of
language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with
some, not _quite_ with me--_proxime accessit_, I should say. He sings
the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and
music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even
wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more
tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the
Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic
notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has
something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and
he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding
for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is not truly
reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his
members sometimes divides the man's attention. He does not always,
perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings
into the talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are
conscious that he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake
off the world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise occasional
disappointments; even an occasional unfairness for his companions, who
find themselves one day giving too much and the next, when they are wary
out of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel[13] is in another class
from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in
conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of
which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is
radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hill-top, and
from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours. He seems
not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of interest;
when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so polished that the
dull do not perceive it, but so right that the sensitive are silenced.
True talk should have more body and blood, should be louder, vainer, and
more declaratory of the man; the true talker should not hold so steady
an advantage over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason out of a
score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, when he unbends
into a strain of graceful gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In
these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen
Anne. I know another person who attains, in his moments, to the
insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve
wrote; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric,
for there is none, alas! to give him answer.
One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that the
sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of
common friends. To have their proper weight they should appear in a
biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good talk is dramatic,
it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent
himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk
where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you
were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the
greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason
that talk depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce
Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk
with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of
man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes
out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren
of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our
being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we have
it, and to be grateful for for ever.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847-1900).
[9] W. E. Henley (1849-1903).
[10] Fleeming Jenkin (1833-85).
[11] Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, Bart. (1843-98).
[12] John Addington Symonds (1840-93).
[13] Mr. Edmund Gosse.
XI
TALK AND TALKERS[14]
II
In the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and
there was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is merely
luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the
evening shared by ruminating friends. There is something, aside from
personal preference, to be alleged in support of this omission. Those
who are no chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm,
have a ground in reason for their choice. They get little rest indeed;
but restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active,
life is alert, and it is in repose that men prepare themselves for evil.
On the other hand, they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves and
others; they have in a high degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity
displayed and proved; what they get they get upon life's terms, paying
for it as they go; and once the talk is launched, they are assured of
honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. The aboriginal
man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and
nail for roots and berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar;
it is like his old primeval days upon the crags, a return to the
sincerity of savage life from the comfortable fictions of the civilised.
And if it be delightful to the Old Man, it is none the less profitable
to his younger brother, the conscientious gentleman. I feel never quite
sure of your urbane and smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's
vanities in silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him on to be an
ass, and send him forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but
radically more contemptible than when he entered. But if I have a
flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a point, my
vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in the course of
the debate. He will not spare me when we differ; he will not fear to
demonstrate my folly to my face.
For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered
society, the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, the
admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more
atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious
ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an
uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their
character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are
silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying
around them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat
in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a thrashing, and make better
intellectual blood. They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a
glance reminds them of the great eternal law. But it is not so with all.
Others in conversation seek rather contact with their fellow-men than
increase of knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, not the
philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity. Even
when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may
call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart
of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of
what delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all
besides, their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking,
tangible people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument
seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed
countenance, floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him
to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would
have conveyed to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so
superlatively conscious of himself, that if, day after day, he is
allowed to hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose
his hold on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a
god. Talk might be to such an one the very way of moral ruin; the school
where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous.
This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And for
persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must speak
with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that
must be proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend to bully
them for their good, they must find either an old man, a woman, or some
one so far below them in the artificial order of society, that courtesy
may be particularly exercised.
The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly
closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above
our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and
pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in
their manner--which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called
a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the
middle class--serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age
and add a distinction to grey hairs. But their superiority is founded
more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the
march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they
have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have
held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and
harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we
can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet long before we
were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or
woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,
sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the clear shining
after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse
like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective,
under the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence
of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before
them "like a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of
death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and
revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in
the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene marred
faces are more eloquent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we
will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken,
we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.
Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds
are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain considerations
overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so
stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature;
classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of
travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I
have said, of the speaker's detachment,--and this is why, of two old
men, the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible
authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests
and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men great friends;
each swore by the other's father; the father of each swore by the other
lad; and yet each pair, of parent and child, were perpetually by the
ears. This is typical: it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy.
The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent
and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look for; it is
perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits
handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning
experience with reverted eye; and, chirping and smiling, communicates
the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. Opinions are
strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of
years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran
in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still
quickens his old honest heart--these are "the real long-lived things"
that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where
they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his
heart to beat in tune with his grey-bearded teacher's that a lesson may
be learned. I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is
now gathered to his stock--Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and
author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether
he was originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew
him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled
into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him
hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not
for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin--and for
that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the
traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by
Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in
the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,
and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could
not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and
Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together; but the
parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and
he was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits.
His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it.
On his last voyage as Commissioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at
sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking-trumpet,
ruffling the while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a
habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was
puzzling and a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and
seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore,
when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have
pointed with these minute-guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour
was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism,
stone, and gravel might have combined their forces against that frail
tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside
Jeremy Taylor's "Life of Christ" and greet me with the same open brow,
the same kind formality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the
man almost to a decade. He had begun life, under his mother's influence,
as an admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his
admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be
punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotsman,
that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the
colloquial, I should certainly be shamed: the remark was apposite, I
suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; he had
known the author--known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic
a contemporary is always something of a trouble. He had the old, serious
love of the play; had even, as he was proud to tell, played a certain
part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully
pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing
Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great scenic display. A Moderate in
religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life by a
conversation with two young lads, revivalists. "H'm," he would say--"new
to me. I have had--h'm--no such experience." It struck him, not with
pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as
he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young
fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought
the battle of life with,--"and--h'm--not understand." In this wise and
graceful attitude he did justice to himself and others, reposed unshaken
in his old beliefs, and recognised their limits without anger or alarm.
His last recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was after he
had been arguing against Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted
by an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all the 'isms, I know
none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some time
before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on circuit, for he
stuck to his duties like a chief part of his existence; and I remember
it as the only occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with slang--a
thing he loathed. We were both Roberts; and as we took our places at
table, he addressed me with a twinkle: "We are just what you would call
two bob." He offered me port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth;
spoke of "twenty-shilling notes"; and throughout the meal was full of
old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like an ancient boy on a holiday.
But what I recall chiefly was his confession that he had never read
_Othello_ to an end. Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved
nothing better than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing
parallel passages from Shakespeare, passages where the same word was
employed, or the same idea differently treated. But _Othello_ had beaten
him. "That noble gentleman and that noble lady--h'm--too painful for
me." The same night the hoardings were covered with posters, "Burlesque
of _Othello_," and the contrast blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An
unforgettable look it gave me into that kind man's soul. His
acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious education. All the
humanities were taught in that bare dining-room beside his gouty
footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was himself the instance
that pointed and adorned his various talk. Nor could a young man have
found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, discontent, or any
of the passions that debase; a life so honest and composed; a soul like
an ancient violin, so subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in
music--as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh
hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.
The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather
hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and critical
attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we
must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin with;
they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious and infantile
vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even
from the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is the
chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business. The old
lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after
years of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack.
If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity
of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened
to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time
chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It
requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal
these stunning corrections among the coxcombs of the young. The pill is
disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment--if you
had not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal
affair--a hyphen, a _trait d'union_, between you and your censor; age's
philandering, for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably the young
man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick
with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The
correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have
transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man
were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment. But
when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any good
humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every
bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and
reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and
ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of
the discipline.
There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened,
who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind
of genial cruelty. Still there are some--and I doubt if there be any man
who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon
Whitford in "The Egoist" says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it
stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and
instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda: his conduct is the conduct of a
man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he
remorsefully considers "its astonishing dryness." He is the best of men,
but the best of women manage to combine all that and something more.
Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of
their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the
proprieties. They can touch a subject and suppress it. The most adroit
employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they
wear gloves when they shake hands. But a man has the full responsibility
of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without
rudeness, must answer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom
left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less
dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of
Vernon Whitford.
But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not sit
throned on infirmities like the old; they, are suitors as well as
sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to
follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into
something unworthy of the name. The desire to please, to shine with a
certain softness of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself,
banishes from conversation all that is sterling and most of what is
humorous. As soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to
flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and
the commerce of words, consciously or not, becomes secondary to the
commercing of eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided,
and a man and woman converse equally and honestly, something in their
nature or their education falsifies the strain. An instinct prompts them
to agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ. Should they
neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, they find
themselves in different hemispheres. About any point of business or
conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a woman will speak and
listen, hear and answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but
with candour and logical honesty. But if the subject of debate be
something in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt
Sally, then may the male debater instantly abandon hope; he may employ
reason, adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail
him nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten
it) she will repeat at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a talk
between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear
fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution. The point of
difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman,
under a shower of irrelevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by
the discreet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward
to the nearest point of safety. And this sort of prestidigitation,
juggling the dangerous topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced
with safety in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true
drawing-room queens.
The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice
and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them
from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy;
their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance;
their managing arts--the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured
barbarians--are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify
relations. It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene
that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the
garden, on the road or the hillside, or _tête-à-tête_ and apart from
interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from any single
woman; and nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage is one long
conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they
but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at
once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the intervals, almost
unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is
turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons
more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process
of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new
worlds of thought.
FOOTNOTE:
[14] This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in _The
Spectator_.
XII
THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
The civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a great
extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal,
in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares
the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the
potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character
of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns
him in a byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have
exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below
exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent
has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond
of dogs, "but in their proper place"; who say "poo' fellow, poo'
fellow," and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the
vivisectionist or heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire "the
creature's instinct"; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to
resuscitate the theory of animal machines. The "dog's instinct" and the
"automaton-dog," in this age of psychology and science, sound like
strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; a machine working
independently of his control, the heart like the mill-wheel, keeping all
in motion, and the consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret,
enjoying the view out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the
stones; an automaton in one corner of which a living spirit is confined:
an automaton like man. Instinct again he certainly possesses. Inherited
aptitudes are his, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views
and understands, as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he
came "trailing clouds of glory." But with him, as with man, the field of
instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; and
about the far larger part of life both the dog and his master must
conduct their steps by deduction and observation.
The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before
the different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak and
that the other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the
dog in the development of his intellect. It hinders him from many
speculations, for words are the beginning of metaphysic. At the same
blow it saves him from many superstitions, and his silence has won for
him a higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of
the dog are many. He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice,
singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to
the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth. The day of an
intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious
communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye,
he lies with his protesting paw; and when he rattles his dish or
scratches at the door his purpose is other than appears. But he has some
apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect
have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by his
master and himself; yet when a new want arises he must either invent a
new vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and
this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the
sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience,
and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between formal and
essential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity
with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has told and been detected in
a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog
of gentlemanly feeling, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The
canine, like the human, gentleman demands in his misdemeanours
Montaigne's "_je ne sais quoi de généreux_." He is never more than half
ashamed of having barked or bitten; and for those faults into which he
has been led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he
retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. But to be
caught lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece.
Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has
been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of language blunts
the faculties of man--that because vainglory finds no vent in words,
creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross
and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with
speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we
had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with
his whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he
would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to
Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their
own merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready. Hans Christian
Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top
to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street
for shadows of offence--here was the talking dog.
It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into
his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of
franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye
ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and
patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and
became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a
gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole
race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered, and affected. The
number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small.
Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far
more theatrical than average man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any
pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit
of admiration. Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the
little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a
few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature
buried in convention. He will do nothing plainly; but the simplest
processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an
elaborate and mysterious etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has
awakened. But it is not so. Some dogs--some, at the very least--if they
be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at
length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game
explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their
devotion to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would
radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate
and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that both are the
children of convention.
The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to
some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members fatally
precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And the
converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog,
moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for
ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier is to receive
a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every
act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the
dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate
and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded
gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the
dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with
matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the
dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and
perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious
and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the
dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the
whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the
other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves
effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we
might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle
presented by a school--ushers, monitors, and big and little
boys--qualified by one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.
In each we should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and
somewhat similar points of honour. In each the larger animal keeps a
contemptuous good humour; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like
impudence, certain of practical immunity; in each we shall find a double
life producing double characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism
combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs,
and I have known school heroes, that, set aside the fur, could hardly
have been told apart; and if we desire to understand the chivalry of
old, we must turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where the
dogs are trooping.
Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of
female innocents has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted
their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a
romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at
war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for; and the part
he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of
Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial
situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign
without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine
wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was
somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a little, very
alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet
bramble for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes. To the human observer he
is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems
abhorrent. A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot
order, he was born with a nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at
their hands the most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating
like a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like
a regimental banner; and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more,
when a human lady upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame
who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one
hoarse cry and fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the tale of
a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly,
in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare
he would then have written _Troilus and Cressida_ to brand the offending
sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of
the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence;
but he had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral
suicide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of
decency, he proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark,
showing, as it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men;
and that with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience
loosens all. "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase,
"the greatest sinner may return." I have been cheered to see symptoms of
effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he
accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I
begin to hope the period of _Sturm und Drang_ is closed.
All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female
dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and
study them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye,
somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of
amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, he
was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter
over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very
proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting
duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be
neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how
he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened,
off posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery,
saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and
his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part,
sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of
his day--his morning's walk with my father. And, perhaps from this
cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length
returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served
him in another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened
not long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed
him with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not
adore her as he adored my father--although (born snob) he was critically
conscious of her position as "only a servant"--he still cherished for
her a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some streets
away to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same
situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit
of a faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem
with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer content to pay a flying
visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary
friend. And so, day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until
(for some reason which I could never understand and cannot approve) he
was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit. Here, it is not
the similarity, it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the
clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his
visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy;
and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so
destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly
obedient to the voice of reason.
There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people. But
the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family.
Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive
respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a
praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble.
And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own
blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater
gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be
Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of
levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of
virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.
I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying
degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for
though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp
what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town,
there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning
to--the phrase is technical--to "rake the backets" in a troop. A friend
of mine, the master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that
they had left one club and joined another; but whether it was a rise or
a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than
he could guess. And this illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real
life of dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At
least, in their dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex,
but of the difference of station. And that in the most snobbish manner;
for the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and
keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his
master. And again, for every station they have an ideal of behaviour, to
which the master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform.
How often has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was
disappointed; and how much more gladly would he not have taken a beating
than to be thus wounded in the seat of piety!
I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared little or
nothing for men, with whom he merely co-existed as we do with cattle,
and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold
him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I believe, a
life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question
in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the
ancestral type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the
nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large
acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street-dog was once
adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do,
gambolling in the mud, charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a
sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into
society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he
hunted no more cats; and, conscious of his collar, he ignored his old
companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognise
the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was
alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he
still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired
respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to
condemn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his human brother. And
thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With
the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the
vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout; and they
live all their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of
their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among a
thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay
upon his conscience; but Woggs,[15] whose soul's shipwreck in the matter
of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal,
and has often nobly conquered the temptation. The eighth is his
favourite commandment. There is something painfully human in these
unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is
the bearing of those "stammering professors" in the house of sickness
and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow
or other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of
sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body he
often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times his
haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful
parody or parallel.
I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double
etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the
showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of
home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of
carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough
posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her
master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning
point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it
would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read
the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different
degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the
flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their
favour in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business
of their lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our
persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same
processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right
against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see
them with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and
with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet
as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to
solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still
inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have
they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from
courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief
reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man
shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an
art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and
strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters
are, in many cases, the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting
aloft like Louis Quatorze giving and receiving flattery and favour; and
the dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their true
existence and become the dupes of their ambition.
FOOTNOTE:
[15] Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which
last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. Glory was his
aim, and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now
lies among the treasures of the nation at the British Museum.
XIII
A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED
These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile Drama.
That national monument, after having changed its name to Park's, to
Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has now become,
for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are
still afoot, the rest clean vanished. In may be the Museum numbers a
full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may
boast their great collections; but to the plain private person they are
become, like Raphaels, unattainable. I have, at different times,
possessed _Aladdin_, _The Red Rover_, _The Blind Boy_, _The Old Oak
Chest_, _The Wood Dæmon_, _Jack Sheppard_, _The Miller and his Men_,
_Der Freischütz_, _The Smuggler_, _The Forest of Bondy_, _Robin Hood_,
_The Waterman_, _Richard I._, _My Poll and my Partner Joe_, _The
Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and _Three-Fingered Jack_, _The Terror of
Jamaica_; and I have assisted others in the illumination of _The Maid of
the Inn_ and _The Battle of Waterloo_. In this roll-call of stirring
names you read the evidences of a happy childhood; and though not half
of them are still to be procured of any living stationer, in the mind of
their once happy owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures,
echoes of the past.
There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the
city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a
party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those
days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself
had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith
Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in
working order, with a "forest set," a "combat," and a few "robbers
carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the
plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon
another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets. One
figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of characters,
bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I
would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff,
2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how--if the name by
chance were hidden--I would wonder in what play he figured, and what
immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel! And then to
go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely
watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those
pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests,
palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults--it was a
giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a
loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it
by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen,
like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the
stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we
were trusted with another; and, incredible as it may sound, used to
demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or
with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal
vacillation, once swept the treasures from before me, with the cry: "I
do not believe, child, that you are an intending purchaser at all!"
These were the dragons of the garden; but for such joys of paradise we
could have faced the Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered
was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like
wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare
with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in
certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the
world all vanity. The _crux_ of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the
uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on these
bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and touch
of them which he would jealously prolong; and when at length the deed
was done, the play selected, and the impatient shopman had brushed the
rest into the grey portfolio, and the boy was forth again, a little late
for dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue winter's even,
and _The Miller_, or _The Rover_, or some kindred drama clutched against
his side--on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed aloud in
exultation! I can hear that laughter still. Out of all the years of my
life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare with these, and that
was on the night when I brought back with me the "Arabian
Entertainments" in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the prints.
I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my
clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me.
I grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he said
he envied me. Ah, well he might!
The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.
Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable, as
set forth in the play-book, proved to be unworthy of the scenes and
characters: what fable would not? Such passages as: "Scene 6. The
Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of
stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting
direction"--such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to
be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much
appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. Of _The Blind_
_Boy_, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince, and once, I
think, abducted, I know nothing. And _The Old Oak Chest_, what was it
all about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of
banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in
the third act (was it in the third?)--they are all fallen in a
deliquium, swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.
I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite
forgive that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to "twopence
coloured." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it--crimson
lake!--the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear)--with crimson
lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for
cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. The latter colour with
gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of
such a savoury greenness that to-day my heart regrets it. Nor can I
recall without a tender weakness the very aspect of the water where I
dipped my brush. Yes, there was pleasure in the painting. But when all
was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled. You might,
indeed, set up a scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was
simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry,
and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance. Two days
after the purchase the honey had been sucked. Parents used to complain;
they thought I wearied of my play. It was not so: no more than a person
can be said to have wearied of his dinner when he leaves the bones and
dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said grace.
Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study that
enticing double file of names where poetry, for the true child of Skelt,
reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen. Much as I have
travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or
abstract, names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of memory, and
are still but names. _The_ _Floating Beacon_--why was that denied me?
or _The Wreck Ashore? Sixteen-String Jack_, whom I did not even guess to
be a highwayman, troubled me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is
one sequence of three from that enchanted calendar that I still at times
recall, liked a loved verse of poetry: _Lodoiska_, _Silver Palace_,
_Echo of Westminster Bridge_. Names, bare names, are surely more to
children than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools remember.
The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the
charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the
attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept
into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we
have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt
appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design
these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to
be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature. The
stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred
staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking
of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama; a peculiar
fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of
voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon the
art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so
thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and
incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme hard
favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the
villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes
themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a
prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other side the
impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity of
gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and
buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the
ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with
cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
The scenery of Skeltdom--or, shall we say, the kingdom of
Transpontus?--had a prevailing character. Whether it set forth Poland as
in _The Blind Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or Italy
with _The Old Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus. A botanist could
tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all-pervasive, running wild in
deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and overshadowing
these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus Skeltica_--brave
growths. The graves were all embowelled in the Surrey-side formation;
the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to
be sure, had yet another, an Oriental string: he held the gorgeous East
in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyères, say, in the garden of the
Hôtel des Îles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But
on these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the
Occidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had a strong flavour
of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and drop-scenes, and
I am bound to say was charming. How the roads wander, how the castle
sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind the cloud, and how
the congregated clouds themselves uproll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is
the cottage interior, the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the
nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and powder-horn and
corner-cupboard; here is the inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee
Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes,
spittoons, and eight-day clock; and there again is that impressive
dungeon with the chains, which was so dull to colour. England, the
hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the
navigable Thames--England, when at last I came to visit it, was only
Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come
home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all
foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen
years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and
thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating
pure romance--still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the
original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the
bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of
Jonathan Wild, pl. 1. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon
some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the
world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my
immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world;
but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see
a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold
scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly
a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree--that set-piece--I seem
to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull,
swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very
spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I
was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der
Freischütz_ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes;
acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent
theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took
from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader--and
yourself?
A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73
Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage
favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest
readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly, or the
bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's or to Clarke's of Garrick
Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient
aspirations: _The Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I cherish
the belief that when these shall see once more the light of day, B.
Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at
times that is not all a dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly
street--E.W., I think, the postal district--close below the fool's cap
of St. Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey
Bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue
and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt
himself, the aboriginal, all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with what a
choking heart--I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I pay my mental
money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.
XIV
A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we
admire the most; we choose and we revisit them for many and various
reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott's
novels, Shakespeare, Molière, Montaigne, "The Egoist," and the "Vicomte
de Bragelonne," form the inner circle of my intimates. Behind these
comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; "The Pilgrim's Progress" in
the front rank, "The Bible in Spain" not far behind. There are besides a
certain number that look at me with reproach as I pass them by on my
shelves: books that I once thumbed and studied: houses which were once
like home to me, but where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms
(and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns, and Hazlitt.
Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of
brilliancy--glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into
insignificance until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and
frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but
"Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,"
must have stood in the first company with the six names of my continual
literary intimates. To these six, incongruous as they seem, I have long
been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of death. I have never
read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not like to be long without
reading some of him, and my delight in what I do read never lessens. Of
Shakespeare I have read all but _Richard_ _III._, _Henry VI._, _Titus
Andronicus_, and _All's Well that Ends Well_; and these, having already
made all suitable endeavour, I now know that I shall never read--to make
up for which unfaithfulness I could read much of the rest for ever. Of
Moliére--surely the next greatest name of Christendom--I could tell a
very similar story; but in a little corner of a little essay these
princes are too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and
pass on. How often I have read "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy," or
"Redgauntlet," I have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it
is either four or five times that I have read "The Egoist," and either
five or six that I have read the "Vicomte de Bragelonne."
Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent
so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the
last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but
the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the "Vicomte" began,
somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage
of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The
name of d'Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend,
for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first
perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time
out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I
understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is
of the execution of d'Eyméric and Lyodot--a strange testimony to the
dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de
Grève, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My next
reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I
would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the
shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly
retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down
with the "Vicomte" for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the
fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened
with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and
such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I
gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind
aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scottish
garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I
would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was
so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as
a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding
with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my
slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book
again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn
to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so
charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real,
perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan.
Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my
favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me call it
my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously
than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in
these six volumes. Perhaps I think that d'Artagnan delights to have me
read of him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a
look, and Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me
with his best graces, as to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I am
not careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV. about
the battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the "Vicomte" one of the
first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works. At least, I avow
myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the "Vicomte"
with that of "Monte Cristo," or its own elder brother, the "Trois
Mousquetaires," I confess I am both pained and puzzled.
To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero in
the pages of "Vingt Ans Après," perhaps the name may act as a deterrent.
A man might well stand back if he supposed he were to follow, for six
volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and withal so dreary a
cavalier as Bragelonne. But the fear is idle. I may be said to have
passed the best years of my life in these six volumes, and my
acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who
has so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered to pretend to be
dead, I am sometimes reminded of a saying in an earlier volume: "_Enfin,
dit Miss Stewart_,"--and it was of Bragelonne she spoke--"_enfin il a
fait quelquechose: c'est, ma foi! bien heureux_." I am reminded of it,
as I say; and the next moment, when Athos dies of his death, and my dear
d'Artagnan bursts into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my
flippancy.
Or perhaps it is La Vallière that the reader of "Vingt Ans Après" is
inclined to flee. Well, he is right there too, though not so right.
Louise is no success. Her creator has spared no pains; she is
well-meant, not ill-designed, sometimes has a word that rings out true;
sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage our sympathies. But
I have never envied the King his triumph. And so far from pitying
Bragelonne for his defeat, I could wish him no worse (not for lack of
malice, but imagination) than to be wedded to that lady. Madame enchants
me; I can forgive that royal minx her most serious offences; I can
thrill and soften with the King on that memorable occasion when he goes
to upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it comes to the "_Allons,
aimez-moi donc_," it is my heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche.
Not so with Louise. Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an
author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for
nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her
mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall
from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before
us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping
market-woman. Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will too often
start the trick of "getting ugly"; and no disease is more difficult to
cure. I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in
particular, with whose works I am very well acquainted, though I cannot
read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside
his ailing puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore
them to youth and beauty. There are others who ride too high for these
misfortunes. Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not
more lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn,
Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names, the
daughters of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and I
am at her knees. Ah! these are the creators of desirable women. They
would never have fallen in the mud with Dumas and poor La Vallière. It
is my only consolation that not one of all of them, except the first,
could have plucked at the moustache of d'Artagnan.
Or perhaps, again, a portion of readers stumble at the threshold. In so
vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs and kitchen offices
where no one would delight to linger; but it was at least unhappy that
the vestibule should be so badly lighted; and until, in the seventeenth
chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, I must confess, the
book goes heavily enough. But, from thenceforward, what a feast is
spread! Monk kidnapped; d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; the ever
delectable adventure of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits d'Artagnan,
with its epilogue (vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the
moral superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St.
Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes,
and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at the
Bastille; the night talk in the forest of Sénart; Belle Isle again, with
the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of d'Artagnan
the untamable, under the lash of the young King. What other novel has
such epic variety and nobility of incident? often, if you will,
impossible; often of the order of an Arabian story; and yet all based in
human nature. For if you come to that, what novel has more human nature?
not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight,
with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and
wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose,
must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But
there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong
as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with
every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right.
And, once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is inspired
with a more unstrained or a more wholesome morality?
Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of d'Artagnan
only to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of the man, I have to add
morality. There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the
world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people who have dipped into
Sir Richard Burton's "Thousand and One Nights," one shall have been
offended by the animal details; another to whom these were harmless,
perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the
rascality and cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again, one
shall have been pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one by
that of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." And the point is that neither need
be wrong. We shall always shock each other both in life and art; we
cannot get the sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there
be such a thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer
some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in
the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity.
I would scarce send to the "Vicomte" a reader who was in quest of what
we may call puritan morality. The ventripotent mulatto, the great eater,
worker, earner and waster, the man of much and witty laughter, the man
of the great heart, and alas! of the doubtful honesty, is a figure not
yet clearly set before the world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial
portrait; but with whatever art that may be touched, and whatever
indulgence, it will not be the portrait of a precisian. Dumas was
certainly not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he put into the
mouth of d'Artagnan's old servant this excellent profession: "_Monsieur,
j'étais une de ces bonnes pâtes d'hommes que Dieu a faits pour s'animer
pendant un certain temps et pour trouver bonnes toutes choses qui
accompagnent leur séjour sur la terre._" He was thinking, as I say, of
Planchet, to whom the words are aptly fitted; but they were fitted also
to Planchet's creator; and perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for
observe what follows: "_D'Artagnan s'assit alors près de la fenêtre, et,
cette philosophie de Planchet lui ayant paru solide, il y rêva._" In a
man who finds all things good, you will scarce expect much zeal for
negative virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him;
abstinence, however wise, however kind, will always seem to such a judge
entirely mean and partly impious. So with Dumas. Chastity is not near
his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of frugality which
is the armour of the artist. Now, in the "Vicomte," he had much to do
with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert. Historic justice should be all
upon the side of Colbert, of official honesty, and fiscal competence.
And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his knowledge;
once it is but flashed upon us, and received with the laughter of
Fouquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint
Mandé; once it is touched on by Aramis in the forest of Sénart; in the
end, it is set before us clearly in one dignified speech of the
triumphant Colbert. But in Fouquet, the waster, the lover of good cheer
and wit and art, the swift transactor of much business, "_l'homme de
bruit, l'homme de plaisir, l'homme qui n'est que parceque les autres
sont_," Dumas saw something of himself and drew the figure the more
tenderly. It is to me even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's
honour; not seeing, you might think, that unflawed honour is impossible
to spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life,
seeing it too well, and clinging the more to what was left. Honour can
survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a member. The man
rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the ruins of
the old; and when his sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his
dagger. So it is with Fouquet in the book; so it was with Dumas on the
battlefield of life.
To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man;
but perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called morality in the
writer. And it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d'Artagnan, that
we must look for that spirit of morality, which is one of the chief
merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets
it high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has
declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless
creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind, and
upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the
copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine,
natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district
visitor--no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all
refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings true like a
good sovereign. Readers who have approached the "Vicomte," not across
country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed avenue of the
"Mousquetaires" and "Vingt Ans Après," will not have forgotten
d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick upon Milady.
What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how agreeable a lesson,
to see the old captain humble himself to the son of the man whom he had
personated! Here, and throughout, if I am to choose virtues for myself
or my friends, let me choose the virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say
there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is
none that I love so wholly. There are many spiritual eyes that seem to
spy upon our actions--eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine
to behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to
offend: our witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should
think me childish, I must count my d'Artagnan--not d'Artagnan of the
memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer--a preference, I take the
freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh
and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but Dumas's. And
this is the particular crown and triumph of the artist--not to be true
merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.
There is yet another point in the "Vicomte" which I find incomparable. I
can recall no other work of the imagination in which the end of life is
represented with so nice a tact. I was asked the other day if Dumas ever
made me either laugh or cry. Well, in this my late fifth reading of the
"Vicomte" I did laugh once at the small Coquelin de Volière business,
and was perhaps a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for
it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a
pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy
foot--within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like
the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear
authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to
me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with
those I love; and, above all, in this last volume, I find a singular
charm of spirit. It breathes a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always
brave, never hysterical. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this long tale,
evening gradually falls; and the lights are extinguished, and the heroes
pass away one by one. One by one they go, and not a regret embitters
their departure; the young succeed them in their places, Louis Quatorze
is swelling larger and shining broader, another generation and another
France dawn on the horizon; but for us and these old men whom we have
loved so long, the inevitable end draws near, and is welcome. To read
this well is to anticipate experience. Ah, if only when these hours of
the long shadows fall for us in reality and not in figure, we may hope
to face them with a mind as quiet!
But my paper is running out; the siege-guns are firing on the Dutch
frontier! and I must say adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade
fallen on the field of glory. _Adieu_--rather _au revoir_! Yet a sixth
time, dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take horse together
for Belle Isle.
XV
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself
should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt
clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with
the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of
continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run
thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if
it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our
books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence
and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush
aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig
for truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside
inn where, "towards the close of the year 17----," several gentlemen in
three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the
Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a
scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he,
to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping
fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than
the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the
brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I
can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane;
night and the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings
of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "post-chaise," the "great
North Road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like poetry. One
and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read
story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but
for some quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere
bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was welcome in its place,
the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different
from either. My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still
remember four different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with
the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to
be the admirable opening of "What will He Do with It": it was no wonder
that I was pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified.
One is a little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and
people groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open
door of a sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in
a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the
figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental
impression I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to
the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling
with his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and
witnessed the horrors of a wreck.[16] Different as they are, all these
early favourites have a common note--they have all a touch of the
romantic.
Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The
pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts--the active and the
passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon
we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we
know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our conduct, anon
merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of
these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is
surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but
I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both
which is not immoral, but simply non-moral; which either does not regard
the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy
relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to
do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and
hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of
the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of
arms, or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is
impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on
moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human
conscience. But it is possible to build, upon this ground, the most
joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.
One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and
places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there.
One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long
rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of
lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls
up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we
feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.
And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain
attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts
of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep surroundings,
particularly torture and delight me. Something must have happened in
such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I
was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I
still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some
places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder;
certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart
for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive
and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with
its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river--though it is
known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his "Endymion" and
Nelson parted from his Emma--still seems to wait the coming of the
appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old green
shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old
"Hawes Inn" at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.
There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of
its own, half inland, half marine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the
tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden
with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and
Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of "The Antiquary." But you
need not tell me--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or
not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.
So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and
inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some
quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many of
these romances have we not seen determined at their birth; how many
people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once
into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn near,
with express intimations--"here my destiny awaits me"--and we have but
dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in
a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that
should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night
and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and
suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour
had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the
Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a
horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green
shutters of the inn at Burford.[17]
Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively
literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added
the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit
and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell,
himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play;
and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once
enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative
writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of
common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but
their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and
to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should
fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should
follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but
all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in
music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a
picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some
attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an
illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting
over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian
running with his fingers in his ears,--these are each culminating
moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for
ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they
are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it
was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the
last mark of truth upon a story, and fill up, at one blow, our capacity
for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind
that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This,
then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought,
or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to
the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words;
the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and
the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared
with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical
or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution,
and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford,
or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to
seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a
legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting
logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite
another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet.
The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is
likewise art.
English people of the present day[18] are apt, I know not why, to look
somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of
teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a
novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced
even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the
art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of
monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of "Sandy's Mull,"
preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people
work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's
inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But
even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer.
Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in
the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived,
fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon
Crawley's blow were not delivered, "Vanity Fair" would cease to be a
work of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the
discharge of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward and consolation of
the reader. The end of "Esmond" is a yet wider excursion from the
author's customary fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the
great and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the great,
unblushing French thief; as usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and
the breaking of the sword rounds off the best of all his books with a
manly martial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the
necessity for marking incident than to compare the living fame of
"Robinson Crusoe" with the discredit of "Clarissa Harlowe." "Clarissa"
is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great canvas,
with inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains wit, character,
passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters
sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be
somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the
only note of what we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and
Byron himself. And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not
a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring
none of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of
love, goes on from edition to edition, ever young, while "Clarissa" lies
upon the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was
twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a
chapter of "Robinson" read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he
had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another
man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and
printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure.
Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to
borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but
one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at
length, and with entire delight, read "Robinson." It is like the story
of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter from "Clarissa," would he have
been fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet "Clarissa" has
every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted--pictorial
or picture-making romance. While "Robinson" depends, for the most part
and with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of
circumstance.
In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the
pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together, by a
common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion
clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres
indissolubly with the other. This is high art; and not only the highest
art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the
greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. Such
are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as
from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are
ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or
subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally
loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights
in age--I mean the "Arabian Nights"--where you shall look in vain for
moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us
among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen.
Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment
and is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to
these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his
romances. The early part of "Monte Cristo," down to the finding of the
treasure, is a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed
who shared these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a
thing of packthread and Dantès little more than a name. The sequel is
one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural, and dull; but as for
these early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant
where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is
very thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but it is brisk
and clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, with envy, an
old and very clever lady setting forth on a second or third voyage into
"Monte Cristo." Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader,
which can be reperused at any age, and where the characters are no more
than puppets. The bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; their
springs are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies
filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures.
And the point may be illustrated still further. The last interview
between Lucy and Richard Feverel is pure drama; more than that, it is
the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. Their
first meeting by the river, on the other hand, is pure romance; it has
nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy and
maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change. And yet I think
he would be a bold man who should choose between these passages. Thus,
in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its order: in
the one, human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine
voice; in the second, according circumstances, like instruments in tune,
shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such as we love to
prefigure for ourselves; and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may
hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more
genius--I do not say it does; but at least the other dwells as clearly
in the memory.
True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into
the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most
pedestrian realism. "Robinson Crusoe" is as realistic as it is romantic;
both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does
romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal
with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is
to conjure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the
disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa is a
very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from
beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of
adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember
rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising.
Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is "a joy for
ever" to the man who reads of them. They are the things that should be
found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of
the same interest the other day in a new book, "The Sailor's
Sweetheart," by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig
_Morning Star_ is very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the
clothes, the books, and the money satisfy the reader's mind like things
to eat. We are dealing here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate
interest of treasure-trove. But even treasure-trove can be made dull.
There are few people who have not groaned under the plethora of goods
that fell to the lot of the "Swiss Family Robinson," that dreary family.
They found article after article, creature after creature, from
milk-kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no informing
taste had presided over the selection, there was no smack or relish in
the invoice; and these riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods in
Verne's "Mysterious Island" is another case in point: there was no gusto
and no glamour about that; it might have come from a shop. But the two
hundred and seventy-eight Australian sovereigns on board the _Morning
Star_ fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of
secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from that
discovery, as they radiate from a striking particular in life; and I was
made for the moment as happy as a reader has the right to be.
To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in
mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art produces
illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and
while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely
clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to
take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the
triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at
being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in character-studies the
pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at
incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage,
suffering, or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are
not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they
stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our
place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or
with Eugène de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common
with them. It is not character but incident that wooes us out of our
reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves;
some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in
the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the
characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in
our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only,
do we say we have been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable
things that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we
are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which
it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded, or calumniated.
It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in
which every incident, detail, and trick of circumstance shall be welcome
to the reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to
the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his
life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it
with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves
to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight,
fiction is called romance.
Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. "The Lady of the
Lake" has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness
and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would
make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through
just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells
undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the
mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside,
the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green
possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, "The Lady of the Lake,"
or that direct, romantic opening--one of the most spirited and poetical
in literature--"The stag at eve had drunk his fill." The same strength
and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that
ill-written, ragged book, "The Pirate," the figure of Cleveland--cast up
by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness--moving, with the
blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple
islanders--singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland
mistress--is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention.
The words of his song, "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene
and by such a lover, clinch, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast
upon which the tale is built. In "Guy Mannering," again, every incident
is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands
at Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method.
"'I remember the tune well,' he says,'though I cannot guess what should
at present so strongly recall it to my memory.' He took his flageolet
from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke
the corresponding associations of a damsel.... She immediately took up
the song--
"'Are these the links of Forth, she said;
Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head
That I so fain would see?'
"'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.'"
On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of
modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the
old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's idea
of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, were something
strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg's
appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the
scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the
four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is
laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The reader will
observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is
how it runs in the original: "a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring
about half-way down the descent and which had once supplied the castle
with water, was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who gave in such copy
would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten
to prepare the reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten
to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to
face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams
all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is
not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative
besides.
Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong
light upon the subject of this paper. For here we have a man of the
finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the
romantic junctures of his story: and we find him utterly careless,
almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style, and
not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In
character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scots, he was delicate,
strong, and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of
his heroes have already wearied three generations of readers. At times
his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety--with a
true heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily
forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man
who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the
Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only
splendid romantic but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he
could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? It seems
to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his
surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they
play to him. He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and
humorous visions, but hardly a great artist. He conjured up the romantic
with delight, but had hardly patience to describe it. Of the pleasures
of his art he tasted fully; but of its cares and scruples and distresses
never man knew less.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of
Charles Kingsley.
[17] Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat
with my own hands in "Kidnapped." Some day, perhaps, I may try a
rattle at the shutters.
[18] 1882.
XVI
A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE[19]
I
We have recently[20] enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in some
detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. Walter Besant
and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very different calibre; Mr.
James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of
finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and
humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate
artist, Mr. Besant the impersonation of good-nature. That such doctors
should differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in which they
seem to agree fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both
content to talk about the "art of fiction"; and Mr. Besant, waxing
exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to
the "art of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the
art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of
prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call
by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present,
at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom
present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic.
Fiction is in the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element
which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer,
Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet
I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these
two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting
lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then,
regarded as a definition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me
suggest another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant
had in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative.
But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English novel,"
the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most
pleasing novel on that roll, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," the
desire is natural enough. I can conceive then, that he would hasten to
propose two additions, and read thus: the art of _fictitious_ narrative
_in prose_.
Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be
denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded
lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature;
but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to
build our definitions on some more fundamental ground than binding. Why,
then, are we to add "in prose"? "The Odyssey" appears to me the best of
romances; "The Lady of the Lake" to stand high in the second order; and
Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of
the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a
narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the
long period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the
principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice
of a noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration
in the same way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured
verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of
dialogue, and a more picked and stately strain of words. If you are to
refuse "Don Juan," it is hard to see why you should include "Zanoni" or
(to bracket works of very different value) "The Scarlet Letter"; and by
what discrimination are you to open your doors to "The Pilgrim's
Progress" and close them on "The Faery Queen"? To bring things closer
home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called
"Paradise Lost" was written in English verse by one John Milton; what
was it then? It was next translated by Chateaubriand into French prose;
and what was it then? Lastly, the French translation was, by some
inspired compatriot of George Gilfillan (and of mine), turned bodily
into an English novel; and, in the name of clearness, what was it then?
But, once more, why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is
obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want
for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is
applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or
of an imaginary series. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (a work of cunning
and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manoeuvres as
(let us say) "Tom Jones": the clear conception of certain characters of
man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents out of a great
number that offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation
of a certain key in dialogue. In which these things are done with the
more art--in which the greater air of nature--readers will differently
judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very special case, and almost a generic;
but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every biography with any salt of
life, it is in every history where events and men, rather than ideas,
are presented--in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay--that
the novelist will find many of his own methods most conspicuously and
adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, who is free--who has the
right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more
precious still, of wholesale omission--is frequently defeated, and, with
all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and
passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervour on the
sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination truth
will seem a word of very debateable propriety, not only for the labours
of the novelist, but for those of the historian. No art--to use the
daring phrase of Mr. James--can successfully "compete with life"; and
the art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish _montibus aviis_.
Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most
various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the
ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to the touch--so thrillingly
delicate, and to the belly--so imperious when starved. It combines and
employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art
only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few
of life's majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of
light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of
incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture, and
agony, with which it teems. To "compete with life," whose sun we cannot
look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us--to compete
with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire,
the bitterness of death and separation--here is, indeed, a projected
escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress
coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed
with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense; none can "compete with
life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these
facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of
the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised and justly
commend the author's talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for a
last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every
case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience,
even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience
itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.
What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the
source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does "compete with
life." Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut
his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like
arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured
and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary
abstraction. Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in
nature: asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand
upon its mouth. So with the arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine
and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up
relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme
of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the
mood of narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues
instead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all,
it imitates not life but speech; not the facts of human destiny, but the
emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them.
The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who
told their stories round the savage campfire. Our art is occupied, and
bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making
them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as
in marshalling all of them towards a common end. For the welter of
impressions, all forcible but all discrete, which life presents, it
substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most
feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of
the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or
like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from
all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and
re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every
incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in
unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another
way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller
without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant;
a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational,
flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience,
like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of
geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a
fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both
untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.
The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to
life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of
leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, a difference
which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the
meaning of the work.
The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible
magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these is
legion; and with each new subject--for here again I must differ by the
whole width of heaven from Mr. James--the true artist will vary his
method and change the point of attack. That which was in one case an
excellence, will become a defect in another; what was the making of one
book, will in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and
then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for
instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the
novel of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite
illogical tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which
appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles and mingled
and inconstant motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with
the same stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional
nature and moral judgment.
And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James refers, with singular
generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden
treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In
this book he misses what he calls the "immense luxury" of being able to
quarrel with his author. The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our
judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake,
and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the
volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. James's reason. He
cannot criticise the author, as he goes, "because," says he, comparing
it with another work, "_I have been a child, but I have never been on a
quest for buried treasure_." Here, is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if
he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated
that he has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master
James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander,
and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck
and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly
retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and
beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent
reason against too narrow a conception of experience; for the born
artist, he contends, the "faintest hints of life" are converted into
revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of
cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those things
which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has done. Desire
is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it
is true that neither Mr. James nor the author of the work in question
has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone questing after gold, it is probable
that both have ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of such
a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and
well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this class of interest,
having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten
road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to
the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character
to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of
wide trousers and a liberal complement of pistols. The author, for the
sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more or less grown
up, admitted character, within certain limits, into his design; but only
within certain limits. Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of
another sort, they had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this
elementary novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with
but one class of qualities--the warlike and formidable. So as they
appear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served
their end. Danger is the matter with which this class of novel deals;
fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are
portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke
the sympathy of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the
hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of
material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The
stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose the
scent.
The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it
requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of
"Gil Blas," it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It turns on
the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied
in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being tributary, need not
march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown. As
they enter, so they may go out; they must be consistent, but they need
not grow. Here Mr. James will recognise the note of much of his own
work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying
it at rest or only gently moved; and, with his usual delicate and just
artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions which would deform
the attitudes he loves to study, and change his sitters from the
humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more
emotional moments. In his recent "Author of Beltraffio," so just in
conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed
employed; but observe that it is not displayed. Even in the heroine the
working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true
tragedy, the _scène à faire_, passes unseen behind the panels of a
locked door. The delectable invention of the young visitor is
introduced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his
method, might avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose
me guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it
belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very
differently conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked
class, of which I now proceed to speak.
I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it
enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly English
misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of
incident. It consists of passion, which gives the actor his opportunity;
and that passion must progressively increase, or the actor, as the piece
proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a
higher pitch of interest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore
be founded on one of the passionate _cruces_ of life, where duty and
inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I
call, for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy
specimens, all of our own day and language: Meredith's "Rhoda Fleming,"
that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,[21] and hunted for
at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's "Pair of Blue Eyes"; and two of
Charles Reade's, "Griffith Gaunt" and "The Double Marriage," originally
called "White Lies," and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to
my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In
this kind of novel the closed door of "The Author of Beltraffio" must be
broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last
word; passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution,
the protagonist and the _deus ex machinâ_ in one. The characters may
come anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before
they leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of
themselves by passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with
detail; to depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and
change in the furnace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the
sort; nice portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept
mere abstract types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of
this class may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it
may be great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart
and the impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the
second class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue
has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind directed
to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the
novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre.
A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead
of a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be
plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in "Rhoda
Fleming," Mrs. Lovel raises such resentment in the reader; her motives
are too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength
of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when
Balzac, after having begun the "Duchesse de Langeais" in terms of strong
if somewhat swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the
hero's clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of
character; they are out of place in the high society of the passions;
when the passions are introduced in art at their full height, we look to
see them, not baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but towering
above circumstance and acting substitutes for fate.
And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene. To
much of what I have said he would apparently demur; in much he would,
somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may be true; but it is not what he
desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its
worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light. He
uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with
the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point,
I may reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful
advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much be
helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest,
as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms. The best that
we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character
or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an
illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it
a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as
sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of
the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag below the level of the
argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men
talk in parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may
be called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative, nor
any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that
is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of
the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it
will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but
to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he
keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care
particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material
detail of the day's manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the
environment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent,
and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the
better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this
age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the
great books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and
before Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind
that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its
exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand
or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in great men,
working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their
complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that
simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their
excellence.
II
Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the
lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none
ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and those
of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave,
the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in art like what there
is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead; he thinks a
form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange
forgetfulness of the history of the race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his
own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of
this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor little
orthodoxies of the day--no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday
or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are
exclusive--the living quality of much that he has done is of a contrary,
I had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A man, as I read him, of
an originally strong romantic bent--a certain glow of romance still
resides in many of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by
accident he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as
often as not, that his reader rejoices--justly, as I contend. For in all
this excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central
human thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I mean
himself? A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances
of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and
aspirations than those he loves to draw. And why should he suppress
himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The obvious is not
of necessity the normal; fashion rules and deforms; the majority fall
tamely into the contemporary shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the
true observer, only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is
lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw the null, and
write the novel of society instead of the romance of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is
reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last.--R. L. S.
[20] 1884.
[21] Now no longer so, thank Heaven!
MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN F.R.S., LL.D.
PREFACE[22]
On the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to
publish a selection of his various papers; by way of introduction, the
following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable
volumes, has been issued in England. In the States, it has not been
thought advisable to reproduce the whole; and the memoir appearing
alone, shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its
justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to
a stranger out of all proportion. But Jenkin was a man much more
remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him. It was
in the world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude
towards life, by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort,
that he struck the minds of his contemporaries. His was an individual
figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the
pages of a novel. His was a face worth painting for its own sake. If the
sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin, after
his death, shall not continue to make new friends, the fault will be
altogether mine.
R. L. S.
_Saranac, Oct. 1887._
FOOTNOTE:
[22] First printed in England in 1907.--ED.
MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN
CHAPTER I
The Jenkins of Stowting--Fleeming's grandfather--Mrs. Buckner's
fortune--Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King
Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career--The
Campbell-Jacksons--Fleeming's mother--Fleeming's uncle John.
In the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to
come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans,
are found reputably settled in the county of Kent. Persons of strong
genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in
1555, to his contemporary "John Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver
General of the County," and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the
proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree--a prince; "Guaith Voeth, Lord of
Cardigan," the name and style of him. It may suffice, however, for the
present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew
to wealth and consequence in their new home.
Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was
William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but
no less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century and a half, a
Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry or Robert) sat in the same place of
humble honour. Of their wealth we know that, in the reign of Charles I.,
Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying land,
and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court. This was an
estate of some 320 acres, six miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and
Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown _in
capite_ by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage
of the sea at Sandgate. It had a chequered history before it fell into
the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to
another--to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to
Pavelys, Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and
Clarkes; a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be
no man's home. But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin
family in Kent; and though passed on from brother to brother, held in
shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and jointures, and
at least once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the
hands of the direct line. It is not my design, nor have I the necessary
knowledge, to give a history of this obscure family. But this is an age
when genealogy has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first
time a human science; so that we no longer study it in quest of the
Guaith Voeths, but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and
destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of
Mr. Galton. Not only do our character and talents lie upon the anvil and
receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our life's
story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the
man is only an episode in the epic of the family. From this point of
view I ask the reader's leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man
who was my friend, with the accession of his great-grandfather, John
Jenkin.
This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
"Westward Ho!" was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been long
enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
connection is singularly involved. John and his wife were each descended
in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York. John's mother had
married a Frewen for a second husband. And the last complication was to
be added by the Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner,
Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's
wife, and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs.
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
immediate circle, was in her old age "a great genealogist of all Sussex
families, and much consulted." The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name the family
was ruined.
The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example
of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
fruits of the neighbourhood; and, like all the family, very choice in
horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle-horse, Captain
(for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family chronicle
which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as the
vicar's foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in
the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door. Debt was the
man's proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of
his church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy. At
an early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he
had two daughters and one son. One of the daughters died unmarried; the
other imitated her father, and married "imprudently." The son, still
more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded
himself with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines,
and was lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_. If he did
not marry below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain
great-uncle William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.
The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post Office,
followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married "not
very creditably," and spent all the money he could lay his hands on. He
died without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak
intellect and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief
career as one of Mrs. Buckner's satellites will fall to be considered
later on. So soon, then, as the _Minotaur_ had struck upon the Dogger
Bank, Stowting and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders
of the third brother, Charles.
Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by
these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;
but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness,
both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a
virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his
relatives. Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt
both salt-water and powder. The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as
I can make out, to the land service. Stephen's son had been a soldier;
William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy
Braddock's in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold
an estate on the James River, called after the parental seat; of which I
should like well to hear if it still bears the name. It was probably by
the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by
his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction
of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the _Prothée_, 64, that
the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days of Rodney's war, when
the _Prothée_, we read, captured two large privateers to windward of
Barbadoes, and was "materially and distinguishedly engaged" in both the
actions with De Grasse. While at sea, Charles kept a journal, and made
strange archaic pilot-book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of
which survive for the amusement of posterity. He did a good deal of
surveying, so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning
of Fleeming's education as an engineer. What is still more strange,
among the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room
of the _Prothée_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for
all the world as it would have been done by his grandson.
On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
scurvy, received his mother's orders to retire; and he was not the man
to refuse a request, far less to disobey a command. Thereupon he turned
farmer, a trade he was to practise on a large scale; and we find him
married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a
London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,
galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel. It does not
appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or
other it must have been; and the sailor-farmer settled at Stowting, with
his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.
Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were
in his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas)
he appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.
He hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and
Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. "Lord Rokeby, his
neighbour, called him kinsman," writes my artless chronicler, "and
altogether life was very cheery." At Stowting his three sons, John,
Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all
born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is through the
report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at
these confused passages of family history.
In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the work of a
fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.
John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the
Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and
secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and
being very rich--she died worth about £60,000, mostly in land--she was
in perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this fortune hung before
successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it
dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.
The grandniece, Stephen's daughter, the one who had not "married
imprudently," appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad
by the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792. Next she
adopted William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with
her--it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up with him in
Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a
place in the King's Body Guard, where he attracted the notice of George
III. by his proficiency in German. In 1797, being on guard at St.
James's Palace, William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne
was once more left heirless. Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the
Admiral, who had a kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by
the good looks and the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner
turned her eyes upon Charles Jenkin. He was not only to be the heir,
however; he was to be the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of
family farming. Mrs. Jenkin, the mother, contributed 164 acres of land;
Mrs. Buckner, 570, some at Northiam, some farther off; Charles let
one-half of Stowting to a tenant, and threw the other and various
scattered parcels into the common enterprise; so that the whole farm
amounted to near upon a thousand acres, and was scattered over thirty
miles of country. The ex-seaman of thirty-nine, on whose wisdom and
ubiquity the scheme depended, was to live in the meanwhile without care
or fear. He was to check himself in nothing; his two extravagances,
valuable horses and worthless brothers, were to be indulged in comfort;
and whether the year quite paid itself or not, whether successive years
left accumulated savings or only a growing deficit, the fortune of the
golden aunt should in the end repair all.
On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church
House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three, among the
number. Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that
followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach
and six, two post-horses and their own four; of the house full of
visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants' hall
laid for thirty or forty for a month together: of the daily press of
neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and
Dynes, were also kinsfolk: and the parties "under the great spreading
chestnuts of the old fore court," where the young people danced and made
merry to the music of the village band. Or perhaps, in the depth of
winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would
ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the
pony's saddle-girths, and be received by the tenants like princes.
This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of
the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of the lads. John
the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, "loud and notorious with his whip
and spurs," settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the
shoes of his father and his aunt. Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is
briefly dismissed as "a handsome beau"; but he had the merit or the good
fortune to become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he
was not empty-handed for the war of life. Charles, at the day-school of
Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod that his floggings became
matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner. Hereupon
that tall, rough-voiced formidable uncle entered with the lad into a
covenant; every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral
a penny; every day that he escaped, the process was to be reversed. "I
recollect," writes Charles, "going crying to my mother to be taken to
the Admiral to pay my debt." It would seem by these terms the
speculation was a losing one; yet it is probable it paid indirectly by
bringing the boy under remark. The Admiral was no enemy to dunces; he
loved courage, and Charles, while yet little more than a baby, would
ride the great horse into the pond. Presently it was decided that here
was the stuff of a fine sailor; and at an early period the name of
Charles Jenkin was entered on a ship's books.
From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye,
where the master took "infinite delight" in strapping him. "It keeps me
warm and makes you grow," he used to say. And the stripes were not
altogether wasted, for the dunce, though still very "raw," made progress
with his studies. It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea,
always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the
glory was not altogether future, it wore a present form when he came
driving to Rye behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral.
"I was not a little proud, you may believe," says he.
In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father
to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace. The Bishop had heard from his
brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an
order from Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the Royal Naval
College at Portsmouth. Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the
head and said, "Charles will restore the old family"; by which I gather
with some surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam
and golden hope of my aunt's fortune, the family was supposed to stand
in need of restoration. But the past is apt to look brighter than
nature, above all to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages
of Stephen and Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.
What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in
which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety
and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at
Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him and visited at Lord Melville's
and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have "bumptious
notions," and his head was "somewhat turned with fine people"; as to
some extent it remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.
In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain
Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The Captain had earned this
name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the
pages of Marryat. "Put the prisoner's head in a bag and give him another
dozen!" survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often
punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship of this
disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from
Sheerness in December 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his
pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which
were ordered into the care of the gunner. "The old clerks and mates," he
writes, "used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,
and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish
smuggler. This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little
offensive."
The _Conqueror_ carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at
the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July 1817
she relieved the flag-ship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm. Thus it befell that
Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played
a small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena.
Life on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome. The anchor was never
lifted, sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on
shore except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial captive were
signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the
accessible portions of the coast. This prolonged stagnation and petty
watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that "unchristian" climate,
told cruelly on the health of the ship's company. In eighteen months,
according to O'Meara, the _Conqueror_ had lost one hundred and ten men
and invalided home one hundred and seven, "being more than a third of
her complement." It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as
once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more
fortunate than some of his comrades. He drew in water-colour; not so
badly as his father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the
_Conqueror_ that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured
him some alleviations. Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the
Briars; and here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches
of the historic house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a
strange notion of the arts in our old English navy. Yet it was again as
an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a
second outing in a ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six weeks to
windward of the island undertaken by the _Conqueror_ herself in quest of
health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and
at the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having "lost his
health entirely."
As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career
came to an end. For forty-two years he continued to serve his country
obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and
honourable services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction.
He was first two years in the _Larne_, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and
keeping a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago.
Captain Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner
of the Ionian Islands--King Tom, as he was called--who frequently took
passage in the _Larne_. King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean,
and was a terror to the officers of the watch. He would come on deck at
night; and with his broad Scots accent, "Well, sir," he would say, "what
depth of water have ye? Well, now, sound; and ye'll just find so or so
many fathoms," as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was
generally right. On one occasion, as the ship was going into Corfu, Sir
Thomas came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows.
"Bangham"--Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord
Bangham--"where the devil is that other chap? I left four fellows
hanging there; now I can only see three. Mind there is another there
to-morrow." And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next
day. "Captain Hamilton, of the _Cambrian_, kept the Greeks in order
afloat," writes my author, "and King Tom ashore."
From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities was in
the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a
subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, "then very
notorious," in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying
dollars and provisions for the Government. While yet a midshipman, he
accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar. In the
brigantine _Griffon_, which he commanded in his last years in the West
Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice
earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to
extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money
due to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in San
Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous imprisonment
and the recovery of a "chest of money" of which they had been robbed.
Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of public censure. This was
in 1837, when he commanded the _Romney_, lying in the inner harbour of
Havannah. The _Romney_ was in no proper sense a man-of-war; she was a
slave-hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where
negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained
provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case, and
either set them free or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship,
already an eyesore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.
The position was invidious: on one side were the tradition of the
British flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the other,
the certainty that if the slave were kept, the _Romney_ would be ordered
at once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission
compromised. Without consultation with any other officer, Captain Jenkin
(then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and took the
Captain-General's receipt. Lord Palmerston approved his course; but the
zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never to be named without
respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-nine years later the matter
was again canvassed in Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain
Jenkin defended by Admiral Erskine in a letter to the _Times_ (March 13,
1876).
In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot's
flag-captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty pennants;
and about the same time closed his career by an act of personal bravery.
He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose
cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches;
his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and
Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were
no longer answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and
slung up several insensible men with his own hand. For this act he
received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of
his gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted Commander, superseded,
and could never again obtain employment.
In 1828 or 1829 Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell-Jackson, who introduced him to his
family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos
Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally
Scottish; and on the mother's side, counted kinship with some of the
Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the Campbells of
Auchenbreck. Her father, Colin, a merchant in Greenock, is said to have
been the heir to both the estate and the baronetcy; he claimed neither,
which casts a doubt upon the fact; but he had pride enough himself, and
taught enough pride to his family, for any station or descent in
Christendom. He had four daughters. One married an Edinburgh writer, as
I have it on a first account--a minister, according to another--a man at
least of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of
Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded. Another married
an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the tale) she had
seen acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps be regarded rather
as a measure of the family annoyance than a mirror of the facts. The
marriage was not in itself unhappy; Adcock was a gentleman by birth and
made a good husband; the family reasonably prospered, and one of the
daughters married no less a man than Clarkson Stanfield. But by the
father, and the two remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions
and a truly Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented. For
long the sisters lived estranged; then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock
were reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the
name of Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her sister's
lips, until the morning when she announced: "Mary Adcock is dead; I saw
her in her shroud last night." Second-sight was hereditary in the house;
and sure enough, as I have it reported, on that very night Mrs. Adcock
had passed away. Thus, of the four daughters, two had, according to the
idiotic notions of their friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the
others supported the honour of the family with a better grace, and
married West Indian magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never
heard and would not care to hear: so strange a thing is this hereditary
pride. Of Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's
grandfather, I know naught. His wife, as I have said, was a woman of
fierce passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them
with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons was a
mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane violence of
temper. She had three sons and one daughter. Two of the sons went
utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty. The third went to
India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly from the knowledge of
his relatives that he was thought to be long dead. Years later, when his
sister was living in Genoa, a red-bearded man of great strength and
stature, tanned by years in India, and his hands covered with barbaric
gems, entered the room unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted
her from her seat, and kissed her. It was her brother, suddenly returned
out of a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of
general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and, next
his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he had mixed
blood.
The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, became
the wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the subject of
this notice, Fleeming Jenkin. She was a woman of parts and courage. Not
beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of seeming so; played the
part of a belle in society, while far lovelier women were left
unattended; and up to old age, had much of both the exigency and the
charm that mark that character. She drew naturally, for she had no
training, with unusual skill; and it was from her, and not from the two
naval artists, that Fleeming inherited his eye and hand. She played on
the harp and sang with something beyond the talent of an amateur. At the
age of seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of
youthful enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without
introduction, found her way into the presence of the _prima donna_ and
begged for lessons. Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she had done,
and though she refused to be her mistress, placed her in the hands of a
friend. Nor was this all; for when Pasta returned to Paris, she sent for
the girl (once at least) to test her progress. But Mrs. Jenkin's talents
were not so remarkable as her fortitude and strength of will; and it was
in an art for which she had no natural taste (the art of literature)
that she appeared before the public. Her novels, though they attained
and merited a certain popularity both in France and England, are a
measure only of her courage. They were a task, not a beloved task; they
were written for money in days of poverty, and they served their end. In
the least thing as well as in the greatest, in every province of life as
well as in her novels, she displayed the same capacity of taking
infinite pains, which descended to her son. When she was about forty (as
near as her age was known) she lost her voice; set herself at once to
learn the piano, working eight hours a day; and attained to such
proficiency that her collaboration in chamber music was courted by
professionals. And more than twenty years later the old lady might have
been seen dauntlessly beginning the study of Hebrew. This is the more
ethereal part of courage; nor was she wanting in the more material.
Once when a neighbouring groom, a married man, had seduced her maid,
Mrs. Jenkin mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance, and
horsewhipped the man with her own hand.
How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the
young midshipman is not very easy to conceive. Charles Jenkin was one of
the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, devotion, simple natural piety,
boyish cheerfulness, tender and manly sentiment in the old sailor
fashion, were in him inherent and inextinguishable either by age,
suffering, or injustice. He looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman;
he must have been everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for
his face and his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you
would have said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that,
to this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But though he
was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to the end no
genius. Upon all points that a man must understand to be a gentleman, to
be upright, gallant, affectionate, and dead to self, Captain Jenkin was
more knowing than one among a thousand; outside of that, his mind was
very largely blank. He had indeed a simplicity that came near to
vacancy; and in the first forty years of his married life this want grew
more accentuated. In both families imprudent marriages had been the
rule; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell had ever entered into a more
unequal union. It was the Captain's good looks, we may suppose, that
gained for him this elevation; and in some ways and for many years of
his life, he had to pay the penalty. His wife, impatient of his
incapacity, and surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain
contempt. She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his;
after his retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor Captain, who
could never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner mumchance;
and even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did not recognise
for long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay buried in the heart
of his father. Yet it would be an error to regard this marriage as
unfortunate. It not only lasted long enough to justify itself in a
beautiful and touching epilogue, but it gave to the world the scientific
work and what (while time was) were of far greater value, the delightful
qualities of Fleeming Jenkin. The Kentish-Welsh family, facile,
extravagant, generous to a fault, and far from brilliant, had given in
the father an extreme example of its humble virtues. On the other side,
the wild, cruel, proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scots
Campbell-Jacksons had put forth, in the person of the mother, all its
force and courage.
The marriage fell in evil days. In 1823 the bubble of the golden aunt's
inheritance had burst. She died holding the hand of the nephew she had
so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down and seemed to bless
him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for when the will was opened
there was not found so much as the mention of his name. He was deeply in
debt; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell
a piece of land to clear himself. "My dear boy," he said to Charles,
"there will be nothing left for you. I am a ruined man." And here
follows for me the strangest part of this story. From the death of the
treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin senior had still some nine years to
live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and perhaps his
affairs were past restoration. But his family at least had all this
while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew what they had to
look for at their father's death; and yet when that happened, in
September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting. Poor John,
the days of his whips and spurs and Yeomanry dinners were quite over;
and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down,
for the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a
peasant. The mill farm at Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and
here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two
ends meet with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the
road and not at all abashed at his employment. In dress, voice, and
manner, he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least
care for appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment
with the present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic cheerfulness,
announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was yet well pleased
to go. One would think there was little active virtue to be inherited
from such a race; and yet in this same voluntary peasant, the special
gift of Fleeming Jenkin was already half developed. The old man to the
end was perpetually inventing; his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated
correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery receipts) of
pumps, road-engines, steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam
threshing-machines; and I have it on Fleeming's word that what he did
was full of ingenuity--only, as if by some cross destiny, useless. These
disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but
rejoiced with a particular relish over his nephew's success in the same
field. "I glory in the professor," he wrote to his brother; and to
Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, "I was much pleased
with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with Conisure's"
(connoisseur's, _quasi_ amateur's) "engineering? Oh, what
presumption!--either of you or myself!" A quaint, pathetic figure,
this of uncle John, with his dung-cart and his inventions; and the
romantic fancy of his Mexican house; and his craze about the Lost
Tribes, which seemed to the worthy man the key of all perplexities; and
his quiet conscience, looking back on a life not altogether vain, for he
was a good son to his father while his father lived, and when evil days
approached, he had proved himself a cheerful Stoic.
It followed from John's inertia that the duty of winding up the estate
fell into the hands of Charles. He managed it with no more skill than
might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare livelihood for John
and nothing for the rest. Eight months later he married Miss Jackson;
and with her money bought in some two-thirds of Stowting. In the
beginning of the little family history which I have been following to so
great an extent, the Captain mentions, with a delightful pride: "A Court
Baron and Court Leet are regularly held by the Lady of the Manor, Mrs.
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin"; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his
wife was the most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was
heavily encumbered, and paid them nothing till some years before their
death. In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild sons,
an indulgent mother, and the impending emancipation of the slaves, was
moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of two doomed and
declining houses, the subject of this memoir was born, heir to an estate
and to no money, yet with inherited qualities that were to make him
known and loved.
CHAPTER II
1833-1851
Birth and childhood--Edinburgh--Frankfort-on-the-Main--Paris--The
Revolution of 1848--The Insurrection--Flight to Italy--Sympathy with
Italy--The insurrection in Genoa--A Student in Genoa--The lad and his
mother.
Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (Fleeming, pronounced _Flemming_, to his
friends and family) was born in a Government building on the coast of
Kent, near Dungeness, where his father was serving at the time in the
Coastguard, on March 25, 1833, and named after Admiral Fleeming, one of
his father's protectors in the navy.
His childhood was vagrant like his life. Once he was left in the care of
his grandmother Jackson, while Mrs. Jenkin sailed in her husband's ship
and stayed a year at the Havannah. The tragic woman was besides from
time to time a member of the family; she was in distress of mind and
reduced in fortune by the misconduct of her sons; her destitution and
solitude made it a recurring duty to receive her, her violence
continually enforced fresh separations. In her passion of a disappointed
mother, she was a fit object of pity; but her grandson, who heard her
load his own mother with cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her
an indignant and impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later
life. It is strange from this point of view to see his childish letters
to Mrs. Jackson; and to think that a man, distinguished above all by
stubborn truthfulness, should have been brought up to such
dissimulation. But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did no harm
to Jenkin; and whether he got harm or benefit from a so early
acquaintance with violent and hateful scenes, is more than I can guess.
The experience, at least, was formative; and in judging his character it
should not be forgotten. But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in
their gates; the Captain's sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, lived with them
until her death; she had all the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though
she was unhappily deformed in body and of frail health; and she even
excelled her gentle and ineffectual family in all amiable qualities. So
that each of the two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by
his very cradle; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and
the lifelong war in his members had begun thus early by a victory for
what was best.
We can trace the family from one country place to another in the south
of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by riding home
the pony from the moors. Before he was nine he could write such a
passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance: "I pulled a
middling-sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it. No
witches would run after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my
nuts blazed away together very comfortably to the end of their lives,
and when mamma put hers in, which were meant for herself and papa, they
blazed away in the like manner." Before he was ten he could write, with
a really irritating precocity, that he had been "making some pictures
from a book called 'Les Français peints par eux-mêmes.' ... It is full
of pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The
pictures are a little caricatured, but not much." Doubtless this was
only an echo from his mother, but it shows the atmosphere in which he
breathed. It must have been a good change for this art critic to be the
playmate of Mary Macdonald, their gardener's daughter at Barjarg, and to
sup with her family on potatoes and milk; and Fleeming himself attached
some value to this early and friendly experience of another class.
His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh. Thence he went to
the Edinburgh Academy, where Clerk Maxwell was his senior and Tait his
classmate; bore away many prizes; and was once unjustly flogged by
Rector Williams. He used to insist that all his bad school-fellows had
died early, a belief amusingly characteristic of the man's consistent
optimism. In 1846 the mother and son proceeded to Frankfort-on-the-Main,
where they were soon joined by the father, now reduced to inaction and
to play something like third fiddle in his narrow household. The
emancipation of the slaves had deprived them of their last resource
beyond the half-pay of a captain; and life abroad was not only desirable
for the sake of Fleeming's education, it was almost enforced by reasons
of economy. But it was, no doubt, somewhat hard upon the Captain.
Certainly that perennial boy found a companion in his son; they were
both active and eager, both willing to be amused, both young, if not in
years, then in character. They went out together on excursions and
sketched old castles, sitting side by side; they had an angry rivalry in
walking, doubtless equally sincere upon both sides; and indeed we may
say that Fleeming was exceptionally favoured, and that no boy had ever a
companion more innocent, engaging, gay, and airy. But although in this
case it would be easy to exaggerate its import, yet, in the Jenkin
family also, the tragedy of the generations was proceeding, and the
child was growing out of his father's knowledge. His artistic aptitude
was of a different order. Already he had his quick sight of many sides
of life; he already overflowed with distinctions and generalisations,
contrasting the dramatic art and national character of England, Germany,
Italy, and France. If he were dull he would write stories and poems. "I
have written," he says at thirteen, "a very long story in heroic
measure, 300 lines, and another Scotch story and innumerable bits of
poetry"; and at the same age he had not only a keen feeling for scenery,
but could do something with his pen to call it up. I feel I do always
less than justice to the delightful memory of Captain Jenkin; but with a
lad of this character, cutting the teeth of his intelligence, he was
sure to fall into the background.
The family removed in 1847 to Paris, where Fleeming was put to school
under one Deluc. There he learned French, and (if the Captain is right)
first began to show a taste for mathematics. But a far more important
teacher than Deluc was at hand; the year 1848, so momentous for Europe,
was momentous also for Fleeming's character. The family politics were
Liberal; Mrs. Jenkin, generous before all things, was sure to be upon the
side of exiles; and in the house of a Paris friend of hers, Mrs.
Turner--already known to fame as Shelley's Cornelia de Boinville--Fleeming
saw and heard such men as Manin, Gioberti, and the Ruffinis. He was thus
prepared to sympathise with revolution; and when the hour came, and he
found himself in the midst of stirring and influential events, the lad's
whole character was moved. He corresponded at that time with a young
Edinburgh friend, one Frank Scott; and I am here going to draw somewhat
largely on this boyish correspondence. It gives us at once a picture of
the Revolution and a portrait of Jenkin at fifteen; not so different (his
friends will think) from the Jenkin of the end--boyish, simple,
opinionated, delighting in action, delighting before all things in any
generous sentiment.
_"February 23, 1848._
"When at 7 o'clock to-day I went out, I met a large band going round
the streets, calling on the inhabitants to illuminate their houses,
and bearing torches. This was all very good fun, and everybody was
delighted; but as they stopped rather long and were rather turbulent
in the Place de la Madeleine, near where we live" [in the Rue
Caumartin] "a squadron of dragoons came up, formed, and charged at a
hand-gallop. This was a very pretty sight; the crowd was not too
thick, so they easily got away; and the dragoons only gave blows with
the back of the sword, which hurt but did not wound. I was as close to
them as I am now to the other side of the table; it was rather
impressive, however. At the second charge they rode on the pavement
and knocked the torches out of the fellows' hands; rather a shame,
too--wouldn't be stood in England...."
[At] "ten minutes to ten.... I went a long way along the Boulevards,
passing by the office of Foreign Affairs, where Guizot lives, and
where to-night there were about a thousand troops protecting him from
the fury of the populace. After this was passed, the number of the
people thickened, till about half a mile further on, I met a troop of
vagabonds, the wildest vagabonds in the world--Paris vagabonds, well
armed, having probably broken into gunsmiths' shops and taken the guns
and swords. They were about a hundred. These were followed by about a
thousand (I am rather diminishing than exaggerating numbers all
through), indifferently armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc. An
uncountable troop of gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers' wives (Paris
women dare anything), ladies'-maids, common women--in fact, a crowd of
all classes, though by far the greater number were of the
better-dressed class--followed. Indeed, it was a splendid sight: the
mob in front chanting the 'Marseillaise,' the national war-hymn, grave
and powerful, sweetened by the night air--though night in these
splendid streets was turned into day, every window was filled with
lamps, dim torches were tossing in the crowd, ... for Guizot has late
this night given in his resignation, and this was an improvised
illumination.
"I and my father had turned with the crowd, and were close behind the
second troop of vagabonds. Joy was on every face. I remarked to papa
that 'I would not have missed the scene for anything, I might never
see such a splendid one,' when _plong_ went one shot--every face went
pale--_r-r-r-r-r_ went the whole detachment, [and] the whole crowd of
gentlemen and ladies turned and cut. Such a scene!--ladies, gentlemen,
and vagabonds went sprawling in the mud, not shot but tripped up; and
those that went down could not rise, they were trampled over.... I ran
a short time straight on and did not fall, then turned down a side
street, ran fifty yards and felt tolerably safe; looked for papa, did
not see him; so walked on quickly, giving the news as I went." [It
appears, from another letter, the boy was the first to carry word of
the firing to the Rue St. Honoré; and that his news wherever he
brought it was received with hurrahs. It was an odd entrance upon life
for a little English lad, thus to play the part of rumour in such a
crisis of the history of France.]
"But now a new fear came over me. I had little doubt but my papa was
safe, but my fear was that he should arrive at home before me and tell
the story; in that case I knew my mamma would go half mad with fright,
so on I went as quick as possible. I heard no more discharges. When I
got half way home, I found my way blocked up by troops. That way or
the Boulevards I must pass. In the Boulevards they were fighting, and
I was afraid all other passages might be blocked up ... and I should
have to sleep in a hotel in that case, and then my mamma--however,
after a long _détour_, I found a passage and ran home, and in our
street joined papa.
"... I'll tell you to-morrow the other facts gathered from newspapers
and papa.... To-night I have given you what I have seen with my own
eyes an hour ago, and began trembling with excitement and fear. If I
have been too long on this one subject, it is because it is yet before
my eyes.
"_Monday, 24._
"It was that fire raised the people. There was fighting all through
the night in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, on the Boulevards where
they had been shot at, and at the Porte St. Denis. At ten o'clock they
resigned the house of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (where the
disastrous volley was fired) to the people, who immediately took
possession of it. I went to school but [was] hardly there when the row
in that quarter commenced. Barricades began to be fixed. Every one was
very grave now; the _externes_ went away, but no one came to fetch me,
so I had to stay. No lessons could go on. A troop of armed men took
possession of the barricades, so it was supposed I should have to
sleep there. The revolters came and asked for arms, but Deluc
(head-master) is a National Guard, and he said he had only his own and
he wanted them; but he said he would not fire on them. Then they asked
for wine, which he gave them. They took good care not to get drunk,
knowing they would not be able to fight. They were very polite, and
behaved extremely well.
"About twelve o'clock a servant came for a boy who lived near me,
[and] Deluc thought it best to send me with him. We heard a good deal
of firing near, but did not come across any of the parties. As we
approached the railway, the barricades were no longer formed of
palings, planks, or stones; but they had got all the omnibuses as they
passed, sent the horses and passengers about their business, and
turned them over. A double row of overturned coaches made a capital
barricade, with a few paving-stones.
"When I got home I found to my astonishment that in our fighting
quarter it was much quieter. Mamma had just been out seeing the troops
in the Place de la Concorde, when suddenly the Municipal Guard, now
fairly exasperated, prevented the National Guard from proceeding, and
fired at them; the National Guard had come with their musquets not
loaded, but at length returned the fire. Mamma saw the National Guard
fire. The Municipal Guard were round the corner. She was delighted,
for she saw no person killed, though many of the Municipals were....
"I immediately went out with my papa (mamma had just come back with
him) and went to the Place de la Concorde. There was an enormous
quantity of troops in the Place. Suddenly the gates of the gardens of
the Tuileries opened: we rushed forward, out galloped an enormous
number of cuirassiers, in the middle of which were a couple of low
carriages, said first to contain the Count de Paris and the Duchess of
Orleans, but afterwards they said it was the King and Queen; and then
I heard he had abdicated. I returned and gave the news.
"Went out again up the Boulevards. The house of the Minister of
Foreign Affairs was filled with people and '_Hôtel du Peuple_' written
on it; the Boulevards were barricaded with fine old trees that were
cut down and stretched all across the road. We went through a great
many little streets, all strongly barricaded, and sentinels of the
people at the principal of them. The streets are very unquiet, filled
with armed men and women, for the troops had followed the ex-King to
Neuilly and left Paris in the power of the people. We met the captain
of the Third Legion of the National Guard (who had principally
protected the people) badly wounded by a Municipal Guard, stretched on
a litter. He was in possession of his senses. He was surrounded by a
troop of men crying, 'Our brave captain--we have him yet--he's not
dead! _Vive la Réforme!_' This cry was responded to by all, and every
one saluted him as he passed. I do not know if he was mortally
wounded. That Third Legion has behaved splendidly.
"I then returned, and shortly afterwards went out again to the garden
of the Tuileries. They were given up to the people and the palace was
being sacked. The people were firing blank cartridge to testify their
joy, and they had a cannon on the top of the palace. It was a sight to
see a palace sacked, and armed vagabonds firing out of the windows,
and throwing shirts, papers, and dresses of all kinds out of the
windows. They are not rogues, these French; they are not stealing,
burning, or doing much harm. In the Tuileries they have dressed up
some of the statues, broken some, and stolen nothing but queer
dresses. I say, Frank, you must not hate the French; hate the Germans
if you like. The French laugh at us a little and call out _Goddam_ in
the streets; but to-day, in civil war, when they might have put a
bullet through our heads, I never was insulted once.
"At present we have a provisional Government, consisting of Odion
[_sic_] Barrot, Lamartine, Marast, and some others; among them a
common workman, but very intelligent. This is a triumph of
liberty--rather!
"Now, then, Frank, what do you think of it? I in a revolution and out
all day. Just think, what fun! So it was at first, till I was fired at
yesterday; but to-day I was not frightened, but it turned me sick at
heart, I don't know why. There has been no great bloodshed, [though] I
certainly have seen men's blood several times. But there's something
shocking to see a whole armed populace, though not furious, for not
one single shop has been broken open, except the gunsmiths' shops, and
most of the arms will probably be taken back again. For the French
have no cupidity in their nature; they don't like to steal--it is not
in their nature. I shall send this letter in a day or two, when I am
sure the post will go again. I know I have been a long time writing,
but I hope you will find the matter of this letter interesting, as
coming from a person resident on the spot; though probably you don't
take much interest in the French, but I can think, write, and speak on
no other subject.
"_Feb. 25._
"There is no more fighting, the people have conquered; but the
barricades are still kept up, and the people are in arms, more than
ever fearing some new act of treachery on the part of the ex-King. The
fight where I was was the principal cause of the Revolution. I was in
little danger from the shot, for there was an immense crowd in front
of me, though quite within gunshot. [By another letter, a hundred
yards from the troops.] I wished I had stopped there.
"The Paris streets are filled with the most extraordinary crowds of
men, women, and children, ladies and gentlemen. Every person joyful.
The bands of armed men are perfectly polite. Mamma and aunt to-day
walked through armed crowds alone, that were firing blank cartridges
in all directions. Every person made way with the greatest politeness,
and one common man with a blouse, coming by accident against her,
immediately stopped to beg her pardon in the politest manner. There
are few drunken men. The Tuileries is still being run over by the
people; they only broke two things, a bust of Louis Philippe and one
of Marshal Bugeaud, who fired on the people....
"I have been out all day again to-day, and precious tired I am. The
Republican party seems the strongest, and are going about with red
ribbons in their button-holes....
"The title of 'Mister' is abandoned: they say nothing but 'Citizen,'
and the people are shaking hands amazingly. They have got to the top
of the public monuments, and, mingling with bronze or stone statues,
five or six make a sort of _tableau vivant_, the top man holding up
the red flag of the Republic; and right well they do it, and very
picturesque they look. I think I shall put this letter in the post
to-morrow as we got a letter to-night.
(_On Envelope._)
"M. Lamartine has now by his eloquence conquered the whole armed crowd
of citizens threatening to kill him if he did not immediately proclaim
the Republic and red flag. He said he could not yield to the citizens
of Paris alone, that the whole country must be consulted, that he
chose the tricolour, for it had followed and accompanied the triumphs
of France all over the world, and that the red flag had only been
dipped in the blood of the citizens. For sixty hours he has been
quieting the people: he is at the head of everything. Don't be
prejudiced, Frank, by what you see in the papers. The French have
acted nobly, splendidly; there has been no brutality, plundering, or
stealing.... I did not like the French before; but in this respect
they are the finest people in the world. I am so glad to have been
here."
And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty and
order read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the reader
knows, it was but the first act of the piece. The letters, vivid as they
are, written as they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement,
yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the profound effect
produced. At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy's mind
awoke. He dated his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day
when he saw and heard Rachel recite the "Marseillaise" at the Français,
the tricolor in her arms. What is still more strange, he had been up to
then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not
distinguish "God save the Queen" from "Bonnie Dundee"; and now, to the
chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and singing
"Mourir pour la Patrie." But the letters, though they prepare the mind
for no such revolution in the boy's tastes and feelings, are yet full of
entertaining traits. Let the reader note Fleeming's eagerness to
influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further
history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and
devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and
omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive "person resident on
the spot," who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture
of the household--father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna--all day
in the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed
off alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the
massacre.
They had all the gift of enjoying life's texture as it comes: they were
all born optimists. The name of liberty was honoured in that family, its
spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign
friends of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the
Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, they beheld
"France standing on the top of golden hours
And human nature seeming born again."
At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their element in
such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in its course,
moderate in its purpose. For them,
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven."
And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth) they
should have so specially disliked the consequence.
It came upon them by surprise. Liberal friends of the precise right
shade of colour had assured them, in Mrs. Turner's drawing-room, that
all was for the best; and they rose on February 28 without fear. About
the middle of the day they heard the sound of musketry, and the next
morning they were wakened by the cannonade. The French, who had behaved
so "splendidly," pausing, at the voice of Lamartine, just where
judicious Liberals could have desired--the French, who had "no cupidity
in their nature," were now about to play a variation on the theme
rebellion. The Jenkins took refuge in the house of Mrs. Turner, the
house of the false prophets, "Anna going with Mrs. Turner, that she
might be prevented speaking English, Fleeming, Miss H., and I" (it is
the mother who writes) "walking together. As we reached the Rue de
Clichy the report of the cannon sounded close to our ears and made our
hearts sick, I assure you. The fighting was at the barrier Rochechouart,
a few streets off. All Saturday and Sunday we were a prey to great
alarm, there came so many reports that the insurgents were getting the
upper hand. One could tell the state of affairs from the extreme quiet
or the sudden hum in the street. When the news was bad, all the houses
closed and the people disappeared; when better, the doors half opened
and you heard the sound of men again. From the upper windows we could
see each discharge from the Bastille--I mean the smoke rising--and also
the flames and smoke from the Boulevard la Chapelle. We were four
ladies, and only Fleeming by way of a man, and difficulty enough we had
to keep him from joining the National Guards--his pride and spirit were
both fired. You cannot picture to yourself the multitudes of soldiers,
guards, and armed men of all sorts we watched--not close to the window,
however, for such havoc had been made among them by the firing from the
windows, that as the battalions marched by, they cried, '_Fermez vos
fenêtres!_' and it was very painful to watch their looks of anxiety and
suspicion as they marched by."
"The Revolution," writes Fleeming to Frank Scott, "was quite delightful:
getting popped at, and run at by horses, and giving sous for the wounded
into little boxes guarded by the raggedest, picturesquest,
delightfullest sentinels; but the insurrection! ugh, I shudder to think
at [_sic_] it." He found it "not a bit of fun sitting boxed up in the
house four days almost.... I was the only _gentleman_ to four ladies,
and didn't they keep me in order! I did not dare to show my face at a
window, for fear of catching a stray ball or being forced to enter the
National Guard; [for] they would have it I was a man full grown, French,
and every way fit to fight. And my mamma was as bad as any of them; she
that told me I was a coward last time if I stayed in the house a quarter
of an hour! But I drew, examined the pistols, of which I found lots with
caps, powder, and ball, while sometimes murderous intentions of killing
a dozen insurgents and dying violently overpowered by numbers...." We may
drop this sentence here: under the conduct of its boyish writer, it was
to reach no legitimate end.
Four days of such a discipline had cured the family of Paris; the same
year Fleeming was to write, in answer apparently to a question of Frank
Scott's, "I could find no national game in France but revolutions"; and
the witticism was justified in their experience. On the first possible
day they applied for passports, and were advised to take the road to
Geneva. It appears it was scarce safe to leave Paris for England.
Charles Reade, with keen dramatic gusto, had just smuggled himself out
of that city in the bottom of a cab. English gold had been found on the
insurgents, the name of England was in evil odour; and it was thus--for
strategic reasons, so to speak--that Fleeming found himself on the way
to that Italy where he was to complete his education, and for which he
cherished to the end a special kindness.
It was in Genoa they settled; partly for the sake of the Captain, who
might there find naval comrades; partly because of the Ruffinis, who had
been friends of Mrs. Jenkin in their time of exile, and were now
considerable men at home; partly, in fine, with hopes that Fleeming
might attend the University; in preparation for which he was put at once
to school. It was the year of Novara; Mazzini was in Rome; the dry bones
of Italy were moving; and for people of alert and liberal sympathies the
time was inspiriting. What with exiles turned Ministers of State,
Universities thrown open to Protestants, Fleeming himself the first
Protestant student in Genoa, and thus, as his mother writes, "a living
instance of the progress of liberal ideas"--it was little wonder if the
enthusiastic young woman and the clever boy were heart and soul upon the
side of Italy. It should not be forgotten that they were both on their
first visit to that country; the mother still "child enough" to be
delighted when she saw "real monks"; and both mother and son thrilling
with the first sight of snowy Alps, the blue Mediterranean, and the
crowded port and the palaces of Genoa. Nor was their zeal without
knowledge. Ruffini, deputy for Genoa, and soon to be head of the
University, was at their side; and by means of him the family appear to
have had access to much Italian society. To the end, Fleeming professed
his admiration of the Piedmontese, and his unalterable confidence in the
future of Italy under their conduct; for Victor Emanuel, Cavour, the
first La Marmora and Garibaldi, he had varying degrees of sympathy and
praise: perhaps highest for the King, whose good sense and temper
filled him with respect--perhaps least for Garibaldi, whom he loved but
yet mistrusted.
But this is to look forward; these were the days not of Victor Emanuel
but of Charles Albert; and it was on Charles Albert that mother and son
had now fixed their eyes as on the sword-bearer of Italy. On Fleeming's
sixteenth birthday, they were, the mother writes, "in great anxiety for
news from the army. You can have no idea what it is to live in a country
where such a struggle is going on. The interest is one that absorbs all
others. We eat, drink, and sleep to the noise of drums and musketry. You
would enjoy and almost admire Fleeming's enthusiasm and earnestness--and
courage, I may say--for we are among the small minority of English who
side with the Italians. The other day, at dinner at the Consul's, boy as
he is, and in spite of my admonitions, Fleeming defended the Italian
cause, and so well that he 'tripped up the heels of his adversary'
simply from being well-informed on the subject and honest. He is as true
as steel, and for no one will he bend right or left.... Do not fancy him
a Bobadil," she adds, "he is only a very true, candid boy. I am so glad
he remains in all respects but information a great child."
If this letter is correctly dated, the cause was already lost, and the
King had already abdicated when these lines were written. No sooner did
the news reach Genoa, than there began "tumultuous movements"; and the
Jenkins received hints it would be wise to leave the city. But they had
friends and interests; even the Captain had English officers to keep him
company, for Lord Hardwicke's ship, the _Vengeance_, lay in port; and
supposing the danger to be real, I cannot but suspect the whole family
of a divided purpose, prudence being possibly weaker than curiosity.
Stay, at least, they did, and thus rounded their experience of the
revolutionary year. On Sunday, April 1, Fleeming and the Captain went
for a ramble beyond the walls, leaving Aunt Anna and Mrs. Jenkin to
walk on the bastions with some friends. On the way back, this party
turned aside to rest in the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie. "We had
remarked," writes Mrs. Jenkin, "the entire absence of sentinels on the
ramparts, and how the cannons were left in solitary state; and I had
just remarked 'How quiet everything is!' when suddenly we heard the
drums begin to beat, and distant shouts. _Accustomed as we are_ to
revolutions, we never thought of being frightened." For all that, they
resumed their return home. On the way they saw men running and
vociferating, but nothing to indicate a general disturbance, until, near
the Duke's palace, they came upon and passed a shouting mob dragging
along with it three cannon. It had scarcely passed before they heard "a
rushing sound"; one of the gentlemen thrust back the party of ladies
under a shed, and the mob passed again. A fine-looking young man was in
their hands; and Mrs. Jenkin saw him with his mouth open as if he sought
to speak, saw him tossed from one to another like a ball, and then saw
him no more. "He was dead a few instants after, but the crowd hid that
terror from us. My knees shook under me and my sight left me." With this
street tragedy the curtain rose upon the second revolution.
The attack on Spirito Santo and the capitulation and departure of the
troops speedily followed. Genoa was in the hands of the Republicans, and
now came a time when the English residents were in a position to pay
some return for hospitality received. Nor were they backward. Our Consul
(the same who had the benefit of correction from Fleeming) carried the
Intendente on board the _Vengeance_, escorting him through the streets,
getting along with him on board a shore boat, and when the insurgents
levelled their muskets, standing up and naming himself "_Console
Inglese_." A friend of the Jenkins, Captain Glynne, had a more painful,
if a less dramatic part. One Colonel Nosozzo had been killed (I read)
while trying to prevent his own artillery from firing on the mob; but
in that hell's caldron of a distracted city, there were no distinctions
made, and the Colonel's widow was hunted for her life. In her grief and
peril, the Glynnes received and hid her; Captain Glynne sought and found
her husband's body among the slain, saved it for two days, brought the
widow a lock of the dead man's hair; but at last, the mob still strictly
searching, seems to have abandoned the body, and conveyed his guest on
board the _Vengeance_. The Jenkins also had their refugees, the family
of an _employé_ threatened by a decree. "You should have seen me making
a Union Jack to nail over our door," writes Mrs. Jenkin. "I never worked
so fast in my life. Monday and Tuesday," she continues, "were tolerably
quiet, our hearts beating fast in the hope of La Marmora's approach, the
streets barricaded, and none but foreigners and women allowed to leave
the city." On Wednesday, La Marmora came indeed, but in the ugly form of
a bombardment; and that evening the Jenkins sat without lights about
their drawing-room window, "watching the huge red flashes of the cannon"
from the Brigato and La Specula forts, and hearkening, not without some
awful pleasure, to the thunder of the cannonade.
Lord Hardwicke intervened between the rebels and La Marmora; and there
followed a troubled armistice, filled with the voice of panic. Now the
_Vengeance_ was known to be cleared for action; now it was rumoured that
the galley-slaves were to be let loose upon the town, and now that the
troops would enter it by storm. Crowds, trusting in the Union Jack over
the Jenkins' door, came to beg them to receive their linen and other
valuables; nor could their instances be refused; and in the midst of all
this bustle and alarm, piles of goods must be examined and long
inventories made. At last the Captain decided things had gone too far.
He himself apparently remained to watch over the linen; but at five
o'clock on the Sunday morning, Aunt Anna, Fleeming, and his mother were
rowed in a pour of rain on board an English merchantman, to suffer
"nine mortal hours of agonising suspense." With the end of that time
peace was restored. On Tuesday morning officers with white flags
appeared on the bastions; then, regiment by regiment, the troops marched
in, two hundred men sleeping on the ground floor of the Jenkins' house,
thirty thousand in all entering the city, but without disturbance, old
La Marmora being a commander of a Roman sternness.
With the return of quiet, and the reopening of the Universities, we
behold a new character, Signor Flaminio: the professors, it appears,
made no attempt upon the Jenkin; and thus readily italianised the
Fleeming. He came well recommended; for their friend Ruffini was then,
or soon after, raised to be the head of the University; and the
professors were very kind and attentive, possibly to Ruffini's
_protégé_, perhaps also to the first Protestant student. It was no joke
for Signor Flaminio at first; certificates had to be got from Paris and
from Rector Williams; the classics must be furbished up at home that he
might follow Latin lectures; examinations bristled in the path, the
entrance examination with Latin and English essay, and oral trials (much
softened for the foreigner) in Horace, Tacitus, and Cicero, and the
first University examination only three months later, in Italian
eloquence, no less, and other wider subjects. On one point the first
Protestant student was moved to thank his stars: that there was no Greek
required for the degree. Little did he think, as he set down his
gratitude, how much, in later life and among cribs and dictionaries, he
was to lament this circumstance; nor how much of that later life he was
to spend acquiring, with infinite toil, a shadow of what he might then
have got with ease, and fully. But if his Genoese education was in this
particular imperfect, he was fortunate in the branches that more
immediately touched on his career. The physical laboratory was the best
mounted in Italy. Bancalari, the professor of natural philosophy, was
famous in his day; by what seems even an odd coincidence, he went deeply
into electro-magnetism; and it was principally in that subject that
Signor Flaminio, questioned in Latin and answering in Italian, passed
his Master of Arts degree with first-class honours. That he had secured
the notice of his teachers one circumstance sufficiently proves. A
philosophical society was started under the presidency of Mamiani, "one
of the examiners and one of the leaders of the Moderate party"; and out
of five promising students brought forward by the professors to attend
the sittings and present essays, Signor Flaminio was one. I cannot find
that he ever read an essay; and indeed I think his hands were otherwise
too full. He found his fellow-students "not such a bad set of chaps,"
and preferred the Piedmontese before the Genoese; but I suspect he mixed
not very freely with either. Not only were his days filled with
University work, but his spare hours were fully dedicated to the arts
under the eye of a beloved task-mistress. He worked hard and well in the
art school, where he obtained a silver medal "for a couple of legs the
size of life drawn from one of Raphael's cartoons." His holidays were
spent in sketching; his evenings, when they were free, at the theatre.
Here at the opera he discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art
of music; and it was, he wrote, "as if he had found out a heaven on
earth." "I am so anxious that whatever he professes to know, he should
really perfectly possess," his mother wrote, "that I spare no pains";
neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he
begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with
characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence
"heart-rending groans" and saw "anguished claspings of hands" as he lost
his way among their arid intricacies.
In this picture of the lad at the piano there is something, for the
period, girlish. He was indeed his mother's boy; and it was fortunate
his mother was not altogether feminine. She gave her son a womanly
delicacy in morals, to a man's taste--to his own taste in later
life--too finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than healthful. She
encouraged him besides in drawing-room interests. But in other points
her influence was manlike. Filled with the spirit of thoroughness, she
taught him to make of the least of these accomplishments a virile task;
and the teaching lasted him through life. Immersed as she was in the
day's movements, and buzzed about by leading Liberals, she handed on to
him her creed in politics: an enduring kindness for Italy, and a
loyalty, like that of many clever women, to the Liberal party with but
small regard to men or measures. This attitude of mind used often to
disappoint me in a man so fond of logic; but I see now how it was
learned from the bright eyes of his mother, and to the sound of the
cannonades of 1848. To some of her defects, besides, she made him heir.
Kind as was the bond that united her to her son, kind, and even pretty,
she was scarce a woman to adorn a home; loving as she did to shine;
careless as she was of domestic, studious of public graces. She probably
rejoiced to see the boy grow up in somewhat of the image of herself,
generous, excessive, enthusiastic, external; catching at ideas,
brandishing them when caught; fiery for the right, but always fiery;
ready at fifteen to correct a consul, ready at fifty to explain to any
artist his own art.
The defects and advantages of such a training were obvious in Fleeming
throughout life. His thoroughness was not that of the patient scholar,
but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate study; he had learned
too much from dogma, given indeed by cherished lips; and precocious as
he was in the use of the tools of the mind, he was truly backward in
knowledge of life and of himself. Such as it was at least, his home and
school training was now complete; and you are to conceive the lad as
being formed in a household of meagre revenue, among foreign
surroundings, and under the influence of an imperious drawing-room
queen; from whom he learned a great refinement of morals, a strong sense
of duty, much forwardness of bearing, all manner of studious and
artistic interests, and many ready-made opinions which he embraced with
a son's and a disciple's loyalty.
CHAPTER III
1851-1858
Return to England--Fleeming at Fairbairn's--Experience in a
strike--Dr. Bell and Greek architecture--The Gaskells--Fleeming at
Greenwich--The Austins--Fleeming and the Austins--His
engagement--Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson.
In 1851, the year of Aunt Anna's death, the family left Genoa and came
to Manchester, where Fleeming was entered in Fairbairn's works as an
apprentice. From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue Mediterranean,
the humming lanes and the bright theatres of Genoa, he fell--and he was
sharply conscious of the fall--to the dim skies and the foul ways of
Manchester. England he found on his return "a horrid place," and there
is no doubt the family found it a dear one. The story of the Jenkin
finances is not easy to follow. The family, I am told, did not practise
frugality, only lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who
was always complaining of those "dreadful bills," was "always a good
deal dressed." But at this time of the return to England, things must
have gone further. A holiday tour of a fortnight Fleeming feared would
be beyond what he could afford, and he only projected it "to have a
castle in the air." And there were actual pinches. Fresh from a warmer
sun, he was obliged to go without a greatcoat, and learned on railway
journeys to supply the place of one with wrappings of old newspaper.
From half-past eight till six, he must "file and chip vigorously in a
moleskin suit and infernally dirty." The work was not new to him, for he
had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work
was without interest. Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know
and do also. "I never learned anything," he wrote, "not even standing on
my head, but I found a use for it." In the spare hours of his first
telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he
meant "to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the ship, and
how to handle her on any occasion"; and once when he was shown a young
lady's holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, "It showed me my
eyes had been idle." Nor was his the case of the mere literary
smatterer, content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do
and to do well was even a dearer ambition than to know. Anything done
well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him. I
remember him with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly
fitted that, when one was driven home, the others started from their
places; the whole spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box;
that plain piece of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of
perfection as the happiest drawing or the finest bronze, and he who
could not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the
others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo's engineering and anatomical
drawings a perpetual feast; and of the former he spoke even with
emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to
separate the fine arts from the arts of handicraft; any definition or
theory that failed to bring these two together, according to him, had
missed the point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing
things well done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last to deny
that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all. And on the
other hand, a nail ill driven, a joint ill fitted, a tracing clumsily
done, anything to which a man had set his hand and not set it aptly,
moved him to shame and anger. With such a character, he would feel but
little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There would be something daily to be
done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be
attained; he would chip and file, as he had practised scales, impatient
of his own imperfection, but resolute to learn.
And there was another spring of delight. For he was now moving daily
among those strange creations of man's brain, to some so abhorrent, to
him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron, water, and fire are
made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more powerful than an
elephant's, and now with a touch more precise and dainty than a
pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I could never share with
him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness. Once when I had
proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect, he looked at
me askance: "And the best of the joke," said he, "is that he thinks
himself quite a poet." For to him the struggle of the engineer against
brute forces and with inert allies was nobly poetic. Habit never dulled
in him the sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his
profession. Habit only sharpened his inventor's gusto in contrivance, in
triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave
and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant the great results alone are
admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in particular, rather the
infinite device and sleight of mind that made them possible.
A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn's, a
pupil would never be popular unless he drank with the workmen and
imitated them in speech and manner. Fleeming, who would do none of these
things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the
subject of remark in Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till
to-day. He thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be
brought in a close relation with the working classes; and for the
skilled artisan he had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues,
and his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well to
regard them, like a platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, on the other
hand, broad distinctions; and it was his profound sense of the
difference between one working man and another that led him to devote so
much time, in later days, to the furtherance of technical education. In
1852 he had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in the
excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both
would seem to have behaved. Beginning with a fair show of justice on
either side, the masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy,
and the men disgraced their order by acts of outrage. "On Wednesday
last," writes Fleeming, "about three thousand banded round Fairbairn's
door at 6 o'clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the
lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders came that no one was to
leave the works; but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called)
were precious hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my
companions and myself went out with the very first, and had the full
benefit of every possible groan and bad language." But the police
cleared a lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape
unhurt, and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so
that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill of
expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob. "I never
before felt myself so decidedly somebody, instead of nobody," he wrote.
Outside as inside the works, he was "pretty merry and well-to-do,"
zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-kindness
to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell,
"working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek
architectural proportions": a business after Fleeming's heart, for he
was never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and
science. This was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love
and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the
greatest, from the _Agamemnon_ (perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to
the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to express in his
familiar phrase: "The Greeks were the boys." Dr. Bell--the son of
George Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and, though he made less use
of it than some, a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race--had
hit upon the singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave
the proportions of the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's
direction, applied the same method to the other orders, and again found
the proportions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were prepared; but
the discovery was never given to the world, perhaps because of the
dissensions that arose between the authors. For Dr. Bell believed that
"these intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of,
the antagonistic forces at work"; but his pupil and helper, with
characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted
the discovery as "a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as
might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical, and in no way
connected with any laws of either force or beauty." "Many a hard and
pleasant fight we had over it," wrote Jenkin, in later years; "and
impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the
arguments of the master." I do not know about the antagonistic forces in
the Doric order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of
these affairs with Dr. Bell was still, like the corrector of Italian
consuls, "a great child in everything but information." At the house of
Colonel Cleather, he might be seen with a family of children; and with
these there was no word of the Greek orders; with these Fleeming was
only an uproarious boy and an entertaining draughtsman; so that his
coming was the signal for the young people to troop into the playroom,
where sometimes the roof rang with romping, and sometimes they gathered
quietly about him as he amused them with his pencil.
In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my
readers--that of the Gaskells,--Fleeming was a frequent visitor. To Mrs.
Gaskell he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his
later friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember. With
the girls he had "constant fierce wrangles," forcing them to reason out
their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss
Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of
his character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish
devotion to his parents. Of one of these wrangles I have found a record
most characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his
doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right
"to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar, or to steal a knife to
prevent a murder"; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what
is current, had rejected the heresy with indignation. From such
passages-at-arms many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no
sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration of the
spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself
"what truth was sticking in their heads"; for even the falsest form of
words (in Fleeming's life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as
he could "not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire
what is pretty in the ugly thing." And before he sat down to write his
letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. "I fancy the true
idea," he wrote, "is that you must never do yourself or any one else a
moral injury--make any man a thief or a liar--for any end"; quite a
different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never
stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not always out of
key with his audience. One whom he met in the same house announced that
she would never again be happy. "What does that signify?" cried
Fleeming. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good." And the words
(as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of motto during life.
From Fairbairn's and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in
Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn's at Greenwich, where he was
engaged as draughtsman. There, in 1856, we find him in "a terribly busy
state, finishing up engines for innumerable gunboats and steam frigates
for the ensuing campaign." From half-past eight in the morning till nine
or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial
comrades, "saluted by chaff, generally low, personal, and not witty,"
pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking
to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be
as little like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, "across a
dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses";
he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by
himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several
ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to correspond. But
not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who
had made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings,
unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical. "Sunday,"
says he, "I generally visit some friends in town, and seem to swim in
clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get
back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this
life." It is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to
stand it without loss. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good,"
quoth the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for
happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life besides, when,
apart from circumstances, few men are agreeable to their neighbours, and
still fewer to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had
arrived, later than common, and even worse provided. The letter from
which I have quoted is the last of his correspondence with Frank Scott,
and his last confidential letter to one of his own sex. "If you consider
it rightly," he wrote long after, "you will find the want of
correspondence no such strange want in men's friendships. There is,
believe me, something noble in the metal which does not rust, though not
burnished by daily use." It is well said; but the last letter to Frank
Scott is scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the writer has outgrown
his old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from a
busy youth of three-and-twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening
alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope _in vacuo_, the
lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under
which youth stands groaning, a voluntary Atlas.
With Fleeming this disease was never seemingly severe. The very day
before this (to me) distasteful letter, he had written to Miss Bell of
Manchester in a sweeter strain; I do not quote the one, I quote the
other; fair things are the best. "I keep my own little lodgings," he
writes, "but come up every night to see mamma" (who was then on a visit
to London) "if not kept too late at the works; and have singing-lessons
once more, and sing 'Donne l'amore 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 the original is Stowting. Even you don't know half how good mamma
is; in other things too, which I must not mention. She teaches me how it
is not necessary to be very rich to do much good. I begin to understand
that mamma would find useful occupation and create beauty at the bottom
of a volcano. She has little weaknesses, but is a real, generous-hearted
woman, which I suppose is the finest thing in the world." Though neither
mother nor son could be called beautiful, they make a pretty picture;
the ugly, generous, ardent woman weaving rainbow illusions; the ugly,
clear-sighted, loving son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours
of pleasure, half-beguiled, half-amused, wholly admiring, as he listens.
But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures fade, and Stowting is once
more burthened with debt, and the noisy companions and the long hours of
drudgery once more approach, no wonder if the dirty green seems all the
dirtier, or if Atlas must resume his load.
But in healthy natures this time of moral teething passes quickly of
itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh interests; and already, in the
letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of hope: his friends in
London, his love for his profession. The last might have saved him; for
he was ere long to pass into a new sphere, where all his faculties were
to be tried and exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and
effort. But it was not left to engineering; another and more influential
aim was to be set before him. He must, in any case, have fallen in love;
in any case, his love would have ruled his life; and the question of
choice was, for the descendant of two such families, a thing of
paramount importance. Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as
he was, the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have
been led far astray. By one of those partialities that fill men at once
with gratitude and wonder his choosing was directed well. Or are we to
say that, by a man's choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he
deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may discern: that a man
but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his helpmate; and he must in
part deserve her, or the treasure is but won for a moment to be lost.
Fleeming chanced, if you will (and indeed all these opportunities are as
"random as blind-man's-buff"), upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he
had the wit to know it, the courage to wait and labour for his prize,
and the tenderness and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes
precious. Upon this point he has himself written well, as usual with
fervent optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase) with a truth sticking
in his head.
"Love," he wrote, "is not an intuition of the person most suitable to
us, most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears
fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be
small indeed; intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would
then be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love works differently, and in
its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each strongly desires
to be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations
which they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the
other, tries to fulfil that ideal; each partially succeeds. The greater
the love, the greater the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more
durable, the more beautiful the effect. Meanwhile the blindness of each
to the other's defects enables the transformation to proceed
[unobserved], so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it ever is, and
this I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred in the
person whom they loved. Do not fear, therefore. I do not tell you that
your friend will not change, but as I am sure that her choice cannot be
that of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe
and a good one. Do not fear that anything you love will vanish--he must
love it too."
Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a letter
from Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins. This was a family certain to
interest a thoughtful young man. Alfred, the youngest and least known of
the Austins, had been a beautiful golden-haired child, petted and kept
out of the way of both sport and study by a partial mother. Bred an
attorney, he had (like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and
was called to the Bar when past thirty. A Commission of Inquiry into the
state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his
true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at
Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato
famine and the Irish immigration of the 'forties, and finally in London,
where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He
was then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's Office
of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled with perfect
competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his retirement, in
1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath. While apprentice to a Norwich
attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent visitor in the house of Mr.
Barren, a rallying-place in those days of intellectual society. Edward
Barren, the son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough,
was a man typical of the time. When he was a child, he had once been
patted on the head in his father's shop by no less a man than Samuel
Johnson, as the Doctor went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale;
and the child was true to this early consecration. "A life of lettered
ease spent in provincial retirement," it is thus that the biographer of
that remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the
phrase is equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The pair
were close friends: "W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,"
writes Barron in his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had moved
to London, and Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers,
the latter wrote: "To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you please,
that I miss him more than I regret him--that I acquiesce in his
retirement from Norwich, because I could ill brook his observation of my
increasing debility of mind." This chosen companion of William Taylor
must himself have been no ordinary man; and he was the friend besides of
Borrow, whom I find him helping in his Latin. But he had no desire for
popular distinction, lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield
of Enfield's "Speaker," and devoted his time to the education of his
family, in a deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits
of stoicism, that would surprise a modern. From these children we must
single out his youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under his care to
be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without
outward sign after the manner of the Godwin school. This was the more
notable, as the girl really derived from the Enfields, whose high-flown
romantic temper I wish I could find space to illustrate. She was but
seven years old when Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her;
and the union thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the husband
and wife differed, and they did so on momentous subjects, they differed
with perfect temper and content; and in the conduct of life, and in
depth and durability of love, they were at one. Each full of high
spirits, each practised something of the same repression: no sharp word
was uttered in their house. The same point of honour ruled them: a guest
was sacred and stood within the pale from criticism. It was a house,
besides, of unusual intellectual tension. Mrs. Austin remembered, in the
early days of the marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and
Alfred, marching to and fro, each with his hands behind his back, and
"reasoning high" till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would
cheer their speculations with as many as fifteen cups of tea. And
though, before the date of Fleeming's visit, the brothers were
separated, Charles long ago retired from the world at Brandeston, and
John already near his end in the "rambling old house" at Weybridge,
Alfred Austin and his wife were still a centre of much intellectual
society, and still, as indeed they remained until the last, youthfully
alert in mind. There was but one child of the marriage, Annie, and she
was herself something new for the eyes of the young visitor; brought up
as she had been, like her mother before her, to the standard of a man's
acquirements. Only one art had she been denied, she must not learn the
violin--the thought was too monstrous even for the Austins; and indeed
it would seem as if that tide of reform which we may date from the days
of Mary Wollstonecraft had in some degree even receded; for though Miss
Austin was suffered to learn Greek, the accomplishment was kept secret
like a piece of guilt. But whether this stealth was caused by a backward
movement in public thought since the time of Edward Barron, or by the
change from enlightened Norwich to barbarian London, I have no means of
judging.
When Fleeming presented his letter he fell in love at first sight with
Mrs. Austin and the life and atmosphere of the house. There was in the
society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to the world,
something gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity, something
unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that could not fail to
hit the fancy of this hot-brained boy. The unbroken enamel of courtesy,
the self-restraint, the dignified kindness of these married folk, had
besides a particular attraction for their visitor. He could not but
compare what he saw with what he knew of his mother and himself.
Whatever virtues Fleeming possessed, he could never count on being
civil; whatever brave, true-hearted qualities he was able to admire in
Mrs. Jenkin, mildness of demeanour was not one of them. And here he
found persons who were the equals of his mother and himself in intellect
and width of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity of
disposition. Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he always loved it. He
went away from that house struck through with admiration, and vowing to
himself that his own married life should be upon that pattern, his wife
(whoever she might be) like Eliza Barron, himself such another husband
as Alfred Austin. What is more strange, he not only brought away, but
left behind him, golden opinions. He must have been--he was, I am
told--a trying lad; but there shone out of him such a light of innocent
candour, enthusiasm, intelligence, and appreciation, that to persons
already some way forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently
the perennial comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful. By a
pleasant coincidence, there was one person in the house whom he did not
appreciate, and who did not appreciate him: Annie Austin, his future
wife. His boyish vanity ruffled her; his appearance, never impressive,
was then, by reason of obtrusive boyishness, still less so; she found
occasion to put him in the wrong by correcting a false quantity; and
when Mr. Austin, after doing his visitor the almost unheard-of honour of
accompanying him to the door, announced "That was what young men were
like in my time"--she could only reply, looking on her handsome father,
"I thought they had been better-looking."
This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it was
some time before Fleeming began to know his mind; and yet longer ere he
ventured to show it. The corrected quantity, to those who knew him well,
will seem to have played its part; he was the man always to reflect over
a correction and to admire the castigator. And fall in love he did; not
hurriedly, but step by step, not blindly, but with critical
discrimination; not in the fashion of Romeo, but, before he was done,
with all Romeo's ardour and more than Romeo's faith. The high favour to
which he presently rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife
might well give him ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present
and the obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when
his aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps
for the only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence. There was indeed
opening before him a wide door of hope. He had changed into the service
of Messrs. Liddell and Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in
the new field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to
face with his life's work. That impotent sense of his own value, as of a
ship aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began to fall
from him. New problems which he was endowed to solve, vistas of new
inquiry which he was fitted to explore, opened before him continually.
His gifts had found their avenue and goal. And with this pleasure of
effective exercise, there must have sprung up at once the hope of what
is called by the world success. But from these low beginnings, it was a
far look upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always
more than problematical to any lover; the consent of parents must be
always more than doubtful to a young man with a small salary, and no
capital except capacity and hope. But Fleeming was not the lad to lose
any good thing for the lack of trial; and at length, in the autumn of
1857, this boyish-sized, boyish-mannered and superlatively ill-dressed
young engineer entered the house of the Austins, with such sinkings as
we may fancy, and asked leave to pay his addresses to the daughter. Mrs.
Austin already loved him like a son, she was but too glad to give him
her consent; Mr. Austin reserved the right to inquire into his
character; from neither was there a word about his prospects, by neither
was his income mentioned. "Are these people," he wrote, struck with
wonder at this dignified disinterestedness, "are these people the same
as other people?" It was not till he was armed with this permission that
Miss Austin even suspected the nature of his hopes: so strong, in this
unmannerly boy, was the principle of true courtesy; so powerful, in this
impetuous nature, the springs of self-repression. And yet a boy he was;
a boy in heart and mind; and it was with a boy's chivalry and frankness
that he won his wife. His conduct was a model of honour, hardly of tact;
to conceal love from the loved one, to court her parents, to be silent
and discreet till these are won, and then without preparation to
approach the lady--these are not arts that I would recommend for
imitation. They lead to final refusal. Nothing saved Fleeming from that
fate, but one circumstance that cannot be counted upon--the hearty
favour of the mother, and one gift that is inimitable and that never
failed him throughout life, the gift of a nature essentially noble and
outspoken. A happy and high-minded anger flashed through his despair: it
won for him his wife.
Nearly two years passed before it was possible to marry: two years of
activity--now in London; now at Birkenhead, fitting out ships, inventing
new machinery for new purposes, and dipping into electrical experiment;
now in the _Elba_ on his first telegraph cruise between Sardinia and
Algiers: a busy and delightful period of bounding ardour, incessant
toil, growing hope and fresh interests, with behind and through all the
image of his beloved. A few extracts from his correspondence with his
betrothed will give the note of these truly joyous years. "My profession
gives me all the excitement and interest I ever hope for, but the sorry
jade is obviously jealous of you."--"'Poor Fleeming,' in spite of wet,
cold, and wind, clambering over moist, tarry slips, wandering among
pools of slush in waste places inhabited by wandering locomotives, grows
visibly stronger, has dismissed his office cough and cured his
toothache."--"The whole of the paying out and lifting machinery must be
designed and ordered in two or three days, and I am half crazy with
work. I like it though: it's like a good ball, the excitement carries
you through."--"I was running to and from the ships and warehouse
through fierce gusts of rain and wind till near eleven, and you cannot
think what a pleasure it was to be blown about and think of you in your
pretty dress."--"I am at the works till ten and sometimes eleven. But I
have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass
scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments
to make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity so
entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work." And for a last
taste: "Yesterday I had some charming electrical experiments. What shall
I compare them to--a new song? a Greek play?"
It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of Professor,
now Sir William, Thomson.[23] To describe the part played by these two
in each other's lives would lie out of my way. They worked together on
the Committee on Electrical Standards; they served together at the
laying down or the repair of many deep-sea cables; and Sir William was
regarded by Fleeming, not only with the "worship" (the word is his own)
due to great scientific gifts, but with an ardour of personal friendship
not frequently excelled. To their association, Fleeming brought the
valuable element of a practical understanding; but he never thought or
spoke of himself where Sir William was in question; and I recall quite
in his last days a singular instance of this modest loyalty to one whom
he admired and loved. He drew up a paper, in a quite personal interest,
of his own services; yet even here he must step out of his way, he must
add, where it had no claim to be added, his opinion that, in their joint
work, the contributions of Sir William had been always greatly the most
valuable. Again, I shall not readily forget with what emotion he once
told me an incident of their associated travels. On one of the mountain
ledges of Madeira, Fleeming's pony bolted between Sir William and the
precipice above; by strange good fortune, and thanks to the steadiness
of Sir William's horse, no harm was done; but for the moment Fleeming
saw his friend hurled into the sea, and almost by his own act: it was a
memory that haunted him.
FOOTNOTE:
[23] Afterwards Lord Kelvin.--ED.
CHAPTER IV
1859-1868
Fleeming's marriage--His married life--Professional
difficulties--Life at Claygate--Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin--and of
Fleeming--Appointment to the Chair at Edinburgh.
On Saturday, Feb. 26, 1859, profiting by a holiday of four days,
Fleeming was married to Miss Austin at Northiam; a place connected not
only with his own family but with that of his bride as well. By Tuesday
morning he was at work again, fitting out cableships at Birkenhead. Of
the walk from his lodgings to the works I find a graphic sketch in one
of his letters: "Out over the railway bridge, along a wide road raised
to the level of a ground floor above the land, which, not being built
upon, harbours puddles, ponds, pigs, and Irish hovels;--so to the dock
warehouses, four huge piles of building with no windows, surrounded by a
wall about twelve feet high;--in through the large gates, round which
hang twenty or thirty rusty Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting
for employment;--on along the railway, which came in at the same gates,
and which branches down between each vast block--past a pilot-engine
butting refractory trucks into their places--on to the last block, [and]
down the branch, sniffing the guano-scented air, and detecting the old
bones. The hartshorn flavour of the guano becomes very strong, as I near
the docks, where, across the _Elba's_ decks, a huge vessel is
discharging her cargo of the brown dust, and where huge vessels have
been discharging that same cargo for the last five months." This was the
walk he took his young wife on the morrow of his return. She had been
used to the society of lawyers and civil servants, moving in that
circle which seems to itself the pivot of the nation, and is in truth
only a clique like another; and Fleeming was to her the nameless
assistant of a nameless firm of engineers, doing his inglorious
business, as she now saw for herself, among unsavoury surroundings. But
when their walk brought them within view of the river, she beheld a
sight to her of the most novel beauty: four great sea-going ships
dressed out with flags. "How lovely!" she cried. "What is it for?" "For
you," said Fleeming. Her surprise was only equalled by her pleasure. But
perhaps, for what we may call private fame, there is no life like that
of the engineer; who is a great man in out-of-the-way places, by the
dockside or on the desert island, or in populous ships, and remains
quite unheard of in the coteries of London. And Fleeming had already
made his mark among the few who had an opportunity of knowing him.
His marriage was the one decisive incident of his career; from that
moment until the day of his death he had one thought to which all the
rest were tributary, the thought of his wife. No one could know him even
slightly, and not remark the absorbing greatness of that sentiment; nor
can any picture of the man be drawn that does not in proportion dwell
upon it. This is a delicate task; but if we are to leave behind us (as
we wish) some presentment of the friend we have lost, it is a task that
must be undertaken.
For all his play of mind and fancy, for all his indulgence--and, as time
went on, he grew indulgent--Fleeming had views of duty that were even
stern. He was too shrewd a student of his fellow-men to remain long
content with rigid formulæ of conduct. Iron-bound, impersonal ethics,
the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the
deification of averages. "As to Miss (I declare I forget her name) being
bad," I find him writing, "people only mean that she has broken the
Decalogue--which is not at all the same thing. People who have kept in
the high road of Life really have less opportunity for taking a
comprehensive view of it than those who have leaped over the hedges and
strayed up the hills; not but what the hedges are very necessary, and
our stray travellers often have a weary time of it. So, you may say,
have those in the dusty roads." Yet he was himself a very stern
respecter of the hedgerows; sought safety and found dignity in the
obvious path of conduct; and would palter with no simple and recognised
duty of his epoch. Of marriage in particular, of the bond so formed, of
the obligations incurred, of the debt men owe to their children, he
conceived in a truly antique spirit; not to blame others, but to
constrain himself. It was not to blame, I repeat, that he held these
views; for others he could make a large allowance; and yet he tacitly
expected of his friends and his wife a high standard of behaviour. Nor
was it always easy to wear the armour of that ideal.
Acting upon these beliefs; conceiving that he had indeed "given himself"
(in the full meaning of these words) for better, for worse; painfully
alive to his defects of temper and deficiency in charm; resolute to make
up for these; thinking last of himself: Fleeming was in some ways the
very man to have made a noble, uphill fight of an unfortunate marriage.
In other ways, it is true, he was one of the most unfit for such a
trial. And it was his beautiful destiny to remain to the last hour the
same absolute and romantic lover, who had shown to his new bride the
flag-draped vessels in the Mersey. No fate is altogether easy; but
trials are our touchstone, trials overcome our reward; and it was given
to Fleeming to conquer. It was given to him to live for another, not as
a task, but till the end as an enchanting pleasure. "People may write
novels," he wrote in 1869, "and other people may write poems, but not a
man or woman among them can write to say how happy a man may be who is
desperately in love with his wife after ten years of marriage." And
again in 1885, after more than twenty-six years of marriage, and within
but five weeks of his death: "Your first letter from Bournemouth," he
wrote, "gives me heavenly pleasure--for which I thank Heaven and you
too--who are my heaven on earth." The mind hesitates whether to say that
such a man has been more good or more fortunate.
Any woman (it is the defect of her sex) comes sooner to the stable mind
of maturity than any man; and Jenkin was to the end of a most deliberate
growth. In the next chapter, when I come to deal with his telegraphic
voyages and give some taste of his correspondence, the reader will still
find him at twenty-five an arrant schoolboy. His wife besides was more
thoroughly educated than he. In many ways she was able to teach him, and
he proud to be taught; in many ways she outshone him, and he delighted
to be outshone. All these superiorities, and others that, after the
manner of lovers, he no doubt forged for himself, added as time went on
to the humility of his original love. Only once, in all I know of his
career, did he show a touch of smallness. He could not learn to sing
correctly; his wife told him so and desisted from her lessons; and the
mortification was so sharply felt that for years he could not be induced
to go to a concert, instanced himself as a typical man without an ear,
and never sang again. I tell it; for the fact that this stood singular
in his behaviour, and really amazed all who knew him, is the happiest
way I can imagine to commend the tenor of his simplicity; and because it
illustrates his feeling for his wife. Others were always welcome to
laugh at him; if it amused them, or if it amused him, he would proceed
undisturbed with his occupation, his vanity invulnerable. With his wife
it was different: his wife had laughed at his singing; and for twenty
years the fibre ached. Nothing, again, was more notable than the formal
chivalry of this unmannered man to the person on earth with whom he was
the most familiar. He was conscious of his own innate and often rasping
vivacity and roughness; and he was never forgetful of his first visit to
the Austins and the vow he had registered on his return. There was thus
an artificial element in his punctilio that at times might almost raise
a smile. But it stood on noble grounds; for this was how he sought to
shelter from his own petulance the woman who was to him the symbol of
the household and to the end the beloved of his youth.
I wish in this chapter to chronicle small beer; taking a hasty glance at
some ten years of married life and of professional struggle; and
reserving till the next all the more interesting matter of his cruises.
Of his achievements and their worth it is not for me to speak: his
friend and partner, Sir William Thomson, has contributed a note on the
subject, to which I must refer the reader.[24] He is to conceive in the
meanwhile for himself Fleeming's manifold engagements: his service on
the Committee on Electrical Standards, his lectures on electricity at
Chatham, his Chair at the London University, his partnership with Sir
William Thomson and Mr. Varley in many ingenious patents, his growing
credit with engineers and men of science; and he is to bear in mind that
of all this activity and acquist of reputation, the immediate profit was
scanty. Soon after his marriage, Fleeming had left the service of
Messrs. Liddell and Gordon, and entered into a general engineering
partnership with Mr. Forde, a gentleman in a good way of business. It
was a fortunate partnership in this, that the parties retained their
mutual respect unlessened and separated with regret; but men's affairs,
like men, have their times of sickness, and by one of those
unaccountable variations, for hard upon ten years the business was
disappointing and the profits meagre. "Inditing drafts of German
railways which will never get made": it is thus I find Fleeming, not
without a touch of bitterness, describe his occupation. Even the patents
hung fire at first. There was no salary to rely on; children were coming
and growing up; the prospect was often anxious. In the days of his
courtship, Fleeming had written to Miss Austin a dissuasive picture of
the trials of poverty, assuring her these were no figments but truly
bitter to support; he told her this, he wrote beforehand, so that when
the pinch came and she suffered, she should not be disappointed in
herself nor tempted to doubt her own magnanimity: a letter of admirable
wisdom and solicitude. But now that the trouble came, he bore it very
lightly. It was his principle, as he once prettily expressed it, "to
enjoy each day's happiness, as it arises, like birds or children." His
optimism, if driven out at the door, would come in again by the window;
if it found nothing but blackness in the present, would hit upon some
ground of consolation in the future or the past. And his courage and
energy were indefatigable. In the year 1863, soon after the birth of
their first son, they moved into a cottage at Claygate near Esher; and
about this time, under manifold troubles both of money and health, I
find him writing from abroad: "The country will give us, please God,
health and strength. I will love and cherish you more than ever, you
shall go where you wish, you shall receive whom you wish--and as for
money, you shall have that too. I cannot be mistaken. I have now
measured myself with many men. I do not feel weak, I do not feel that I
shall fail. In many things I have succeeded, and I will in this. And
meanwhile the time of waiting, which, please Heaven, shall not be long,
shall also not be so bitter. Well, well, I promise much, and do not know
at this moment how you and the dear child are. If he is but better,
courage, my girl, for I see light."
This cottage at Claygate stood just without the village, well surrounded
with trees, and commanding a pleasant view. A piece of the garden was
turfed over to form a croquet-green, and Fleeming became (I need scarce
say) a very ardent player. He grew ardent, too, in gardening. This he
took up at first to please his wife, having no natural inclination; but
he had no sooner set his hand to it than, like everything else he
touched, it became with him a passion. He budded roses, he potted
cuttings in the coach-house; if there came a change of weather at night
he would rise out of bed to protect his favourites; when he was thrown
with a dull companion, it was enough for him to discover in the man a
fellow-gardener; on his travels, he would go out of his way to visit
nurseries and gather hints; and to the end of his life, after other
occupations prevented him putting his own hand to the spade, he drew up
a yearly programme for his gardener, in which all details were
regulated. He had begun by this time to write. His paper on Darwin,
which had the merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself,
had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was
not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that
review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which
Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second
edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity
of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a
whole review borrowed and reprinted by Matthews Duncan, are compliments
of a rare strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been
precious indeed. There was yet a third of the same kind in store for
him; and when Munro himself owned that he had found instruction in the
paper on Lucretius, we may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the
Capitol of reviewing.
Croquet, charades, Christmas magic lanterns for the village children, an
amateur concert or a review article in the evening; plenty of hard work
by day; regular visits to meetings of the British Association, from one
of which I find him characteristically writing: "I cannot say that I
have had any amusement yet, but I am enjoying the dulness and dry bustle
of the whole thing"; occasional visits abroad on business, when he would
find the time to glean (as I have said) gardening hints for himself, and
old folk-songs or new fashions of dress for his wife; and the continual
study and care of his children: these were the chief elements of his
life. Nor were friends wanting. Captain and Mrs. Jenkin, Mr. and Mrs.
Austin, Clerk Maxwell, Miss Bell of Manchester, and others, came to them
on visits. Mr. Hertslet of the Foreign Office, his wife and his
daughter, were neighbours, and proved kind friends; in 1867 the Howitts
came to Claygate and sought the society of "the two bright, clever young
people";[25] and in a house close by Mr. Frederick Ricketts came to live
with his family. Mr. Ricketts was a valued friend during his short life;
and when he was lost, with every circumstance of heroism, in the _La
Plata_, Fleeming mourned him sincerely.
I think I shall give the best idea of Fleeming in this time of his early
married life, by a few sustained extracts from his letters to his wife,
while she was absent on a visit in 1864.
"_Nov. 11._--Sunday was too wet to walk to Isleworth, for which I was
sorry, so I stayed and went to church and thought of you at Ardwick
all through the Commandments, and heard Dr. ---- expound in a
remarkable way a prophecy of St. Paul about Roman Catholics, which,
_mutatis mutandis_, would do very well for Protestants in some parts.
Then I made a little nursery of borecole and Enfield market cabbage,
grubbing in wet earth with leggings and grey coat on. Then I tidied up
the coach-house to my own and Christine's admiration. Then encouraged
by _bouts-rimés_ I wrote you a copy of verses; high time, I think; I
shall just save my tenth year of knowing my lady love without inditing
poetry or rhymes to her.
"Then I rummaged over the box with my father's letters, and found
interesting notes from myself. One I should say my first letter, which
little Austin I should say would rejoice to see, and shall see--with a
drawing of a cottage and a spirited 'cob.' What was more to the
purpose, I found with it a paste-cutter which Mary begged humbly for
Christine, and I generously gave this morning.
"Then I read some of Congreve. There are admirable scenes in the
manner of Sheridan; all wit and no character, or rather one character
in a great variety of situations and scenes. I could show you some
scenes, but others are too coarse even for my stomach, hardened by a
course of French novels.
"All things look so happy for the rain.
"_Nov. 16._--Verbenas looking well.... I am but a poor creature
without you; I have naturally no spirit or fun or enterprise in me.
Only a kind of mechanical capacity for ascertaining whether two really
is half four, etc.; but when you are near me I can fancy that I too
shine, and vainly suppose it to be my proper light; whereas by my
extreme darkness when you are not by, it clearly can only be by a
reflected brilliance that I seem aught but dull. Then for the moral
part of me: if it were not for you and little Odden, I should feel by
no means sure that I had any affection power in me.... Even the
muscular me suffers a sad deterioration in your absence. I don't get
up when I ought to, I have snoozed in my chair after dinner; I do not
go in at the garden with my wonted vigour, and feel ten times as tired
as usual with a walk in your absence; so you see, when you are not by,
I am a person without ability, affections, or vigour, but droop, dull,
selfish, and spiritless; can you wonder that I love you?
"_Nov. 17._--... I am very glad we married young. I would not have
missed these five years--no, not for any hopes; they are my own.
"_Nov. 30._--I got through my Chatham lecture very fairly, though
almost all my apparatus went astray. I dined at the mess, and got home
to Isleworth the same evening; your father very kindly sitting up for
me.
"_Dec. 1._--Back at dear Claygate. Many cuttings flourish, especially
those which do honour to your hand. Your Californian annuals are up
and about. Badger is fat, the grass green....
"_Dec. 3._--Odden will not talk of you, while you are away, having
inherited, as I suspect, his father's way of declining to consider a
subject which is painful, as your absence is.... I certainly should
like to learn Greek, and I think it would be a capital pastime for the
long winter evenings.... How things are misrated! I declare croquet is
a noble occupation compared to the pursuits of business men. As for
so-called idleness--that is, one form of it--I vow it is the noblest
aim of man. When idle, one can love, one can be good, feel kindly to
all, devote oneself to others, be thankful for existence, educate
one's mind, one's heart, one's body. When busy, as I am busy now or
have been busy to-day, one feels just as you sometimes felt when you
were too busy, owing to want of servants.
"_Dec. 5._--On Sunday I was at Isleworth, chiefly engaged in playing
with Odden. We had the most enchanting walk together through the
brickfields. It was very muddy, and, as he remarked, not fit for
Nanna, but fit for us _men_. The dreary waste of bared earth, thatched
sheds and standing water was a paradise to him; and when we walked up
planks to deserted mixing and crushing mills, and actually saw where
the clay was stirred with long iron prongs, and chalk or lime ground
with 'a tind of a mill,' his expression of contentment and triumphant
heroism knew no limit to its beauty. Of course on returning I found
Mrs. Austin looking out at the door in an anxious manner, and thinking
we had been out quite long enough.... I am reading Don Quixote
chiefly, and am his fervent admirer, but I am so sorry he did not
place his affections on a Dulcinea of somewhat worthier stamp. In fact
I think there must be a mistake about it. Don Quixote might and would
serve his lady in most preposterous fashion, but I am sure he would
have chosen a lady of merit. He imagined her to be such, no doubt,
and drew a charming picture of her occupations by the banks of the
river; but in his other imaginations there was some kind of peg on
which to hang the false costumes he created; windmills are big, and
wave their arms like giants; sheep in the distance are somewhat like
an army; a little boat on the river-side must look much the same
whether enchanted or belonging to millers; but except that Dulcinea is
a woman, she bears no resemblance at all to the damsel of his
imagination."
At the time of these letters the oldest son only was born to them. In
September of the next year, with the birth of the second, Charles
Frewen, there befell Fleeming a terrible alarm, and what proved to be a
lifelong misfortune. Mrs. Jenkin was taken suddenly and alarmingly ill;
Fleeming ran a matter of two miles to fetch the doctor, and, drenched
with sweat as he was, returned with him at once in an open gig. On their
arrival at the house, Mrs. Jenkin half unconsciously took and kept hold
of her husband's hand. By the doctor's orders, windows and doors were
set open to create a thorough draught, and the patient was on no account
to be disturbed. Thus, then, did Fleeming pass the whole of that night,
crouching on the floor in the draught, and not daring to move lest he
should wake the sleeper. He had never been strong; energy had stood him
in stead of vigour; and the result of that night's exposure was flying
rheumatism varied with settled sciatica. Sometimes it quite disabled
him, sometimes it was less acute; but he was rarely free from it until
his death. I knew him for many years; for more than ten we were closely
intimate; I have lived with him for weeks; and during all this time he
only once referred to his infirmity, and then perforce, as an excuse for
some trouble he put me to, and so slightly worded that I paid no heed.
This is a good measure of his courage under sufferings of which none but
the untried will think lightly. And I think it worth noting how this
optimist was acquainted with pain. It will seem strange only to the
superficial. The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles,
which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well. Nor
does it readily spring at all, in minds that have conceived of life as
a field of ordered duties, not as a chase in which to hunt for
gratifications. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good"; I wish he
had mended the phrase: "We are not here to be happy, but to try to be
good," comes nearer the modesty of truth. With such old-fashioned
morality it is possible to get through life, and see the worst of it,
and feel some of the worst of it, and still acquiesce piously and even
gladly in man's fate. Feel some of the worst of it, I say; for some of
the rest of the worst is, by this simple faith, excluded.
It was in the year 1868 that the clouds finally rose. The business in
partnership with Mr. Forde began suddenly to pay well; about the same
time the patents showed themselves a valuable property; and but a little
after, Fleeming was appointed to the new Chair of Engineering in the
University of Edinburgh. Thus, almost at once, pecuniary embarrassments
passed for ever out of his life. Here is his own epilogue to the time at
Claygate, and his anticipations of the future in Edinburgh:--
"... The dear old house at Claygate is not let, and the pretty garden
a mass of weeds. I feel rather as if we had behaved unkindly to them.
We were very happy there, but now that it is over I am conscious of
the weight of anxiety as to money which I bore all the time. With you
in the garden, with Austin in the coach-house, with pretty songs in
the little low white room, with the moonlight in the dear room
upstairs,--ah, it was perfect; but the long walk, wondering,
pondering, fearing, scheming, and the dusty jolting railway, and the
horrid fusty office with its endless disappointments, they are well
gone. It is well enough to fight and scheme, and bustle about in the
eager crowd here [in London] for a while now and then, but not for a
lifetime. What I have now is just perfect. Study for winter, action
for summer, lovely country for recreation, a pleasant town for
talk...."
FOOTNOTES:
[24] The note by Lord Kelvin, appended in 1887 to the original edition
of this Memoir, is not included in the present edition.--ED.
[25] "Reminiscences of My Later Life," by Mary Howitt, _Good Words_,
May 1886.
CHAPTER V
NOTES OF TELEGRAPH VOYAGES, 1858-1873
But it is now time to see Jenkin at his life's work. I have before me
certain imperfect series of letters written, as he says, "at hazard, for
one does not know at the time what is important and what is not": the
earlier addressed to Miss Austin, after the betrothal; the later to Mrs.
Jenkin, the young wife. I should premise that I have allowed myself
certain editorial freedoms, leaving out and splicing together, much as
he himself did with the Bona cable: thus edited the letters speak for
themselves, and will fail to interest none who love adventure or
activity. Addressed as they were to her whom he called his "dear
engineering pupil," they give a picture of his work so clear that a
child may understand, and so attractive that I am half afraid their
publication may prove harmful, and still further crowd the ranks of a
profession already overcrowded. But their most engaging quality is the
picture of the writer; with his indomitable self-confidence and courage,
his readiness in every pinch of circumstance or change of plan, and his
ever fresh enjoyment of the whole web of human experience, nature,
adventure, science, toil and rest, society and solitude. It should be
borne in mind that the writer of these buoyant pages was, even while he
wrote, harassed by responsibility, stinted in sleep, and often
struggling with the prostration of sea-sickness. To this last enemy,
which he never overcame, I have omitted, in my search after
condensation, a good many references; if they were all left, such was
the man's temper, they would not represent one hundredth part of what he
suffered, for he was never given to complaint. But indeed he had met
this ugly trifle, as he met every thwart circumstance of life, with a
certain pleasure of pugnacity; and suffered it not to check him, whether
in the exercise of his profession or the pursuit of amusement.
I
_"Birkenhead. April 18, 1858._
"Well, you should know, Mr. ---- having a contract to lay down a
submarine telegraph from Sardinia to Africa failed three times in the
attempt. The distance from land to land is about 140 miles. On the
first occasion, after proceeding some 70 miles, he had to cut the
cable--the cause I forget; he tried again, same result; then picked up
about 20 miles of the lost cable, spliced on a new piece, and very
nearly got across that time, but ran short of cable, and, when but a
few miles off Galita in very deep water, had to telegraph to London
for more cable to be manufactured and sent out whilst he tried to
stick to the end: for five days, I think, he lay there sending and
receiving messages, but, heavy weather coming on, the cable parted and
Mr. ---- went home in despair--at least I should think so.
"He then applied to those eminent engineers, R. S. Newall and Co., who
made and laid down a cable for him last autumn--Fleeming Jenkin (at
the time in considerable mental agitation) having the honour of
fitting out the _Elba_ for that purpose." [On this occasion, the
_Elba_ has no cable to lay; but] "is going out in the beginning of May
to endeavour to fish up the cables Mr. ---- lost. There are two ends
at or near the shore: the third will probably not be found within 20
miles from land. One of these ends will be passed over a very big
pulley or sheave at the bows, passed six times round a big barrel or
drum; which will be turned round by a steam-engine on deck, and thus
wind up the cable, while the _Elba_ slowly steams ahead. The cable is
not wound round and round the drum as your silk is wound on its reel,
but on the contrary never goes round more than six times, going off at
one side as it comes on at the other, and going down into the hold of
the _Elba_, to be coiled along in a big coil or skein.
"I went down to Gateshead to discuss with Mr. Newall the form which
this tolerably simple idea should take, and have been busy since I
came here drawing, ordering, and putting up the
machinery--uninterfered with, thank goodness, by any one. I own I like
responsibility; it flatters one, and then, your father might say, I
have more to gain than to lose. Moreover I do like this bloodless,
painless combat with wood and iron, forcing the stubborn rascals to do
my will, licking the clumsy cubs into an active shape, seeing the
child of to-day's thought working to-morrow in full vigour at his
appointed task.
"_May 12._
"By dint of bribing, bullying, cajoling, and going day by day to see
the state of things ordered, all my work is very nearly ready now; but
those who have neglected these precautions are of course disappointed.
Five hundred fathoms of chain [were] ordered by ---- some three weeks
since, to be ready by the 10th without fail; he sends for it
to-day--150 fathoms all they can let us have by the 15th--and how the
rest is to be got, who knows? He ordered a boat a month since, and
yesterday we could see nothing of her but the keel and about two
planks. I could multiply instances without end. At first one goes
nearly mad with vexation at these things; but one finds so soon that
they are the rule, that then it becomes necessary to feign a rage one
does not feel. I look upon it as the natural order of things, that if
I order a thing, it will not be done--if by accident it gets done, it
will certainly be done wrong; the only remedy being to watch the
performance at every stage.
"To-day was a grand field-day. I had steam up and tried the engine
against pressure or resistance. One part of the machinery is driven by
belt or strap of leather. I always had my doubts this might slip; and
so it did, wildly. I had made provision for doubling it, putting on
two belts instead of one. No use--off they went, slipping round and
off the pulleys instead of driving the machinery. Tighten them--no
use. More strength there--down with the lever--smash something, tear
the belts, but get them tight--now then stand clear, on with the
steam;--and the belts slip away, as if nothing held them. Men begin to
look queer; the circle of quidnuncs make sage remarks. Once more--no
use. I begin to know I ought to feel sheepish and beat, but somehow I
feel cocky instead, I laugh and say, 'Well, I am bound to break
something down'--and suddenly see. 'Oho, there's the place; get weight
on there, and the belt won't slip.' With much labour, on go the belts
again. 'Now then, a spar thro' there and six men's weight on; mind
you're not carried away.' 'Ay, ay, sir.' But evidently no one believes
in the plan. 'Hurrah, round she goes--stick to your spar. All right,
shut off steam.' And the difficulty is vanquished.
"This, or such as this (not always quite so bad), occurs hour after
hour, while five hundred tons of coal are rattling down into the holds
and bunkers, riveters are making their infernal row all round, and
riggers bend the sails and fit the rigging:--a sort of Pandemonium, it
appeared to young Mrs. Newall, who was here on Monday and half choked
with guano; but it suits the likes of me.
"_SS. Elba, River Mersey, May 17._
"We are delayed in the river by some of the ship's papers not being
ready. Such a scene at the dock gates. Not a sailor will join till the
last moment; and then, just as the ship forges ahead through the
narrow pass, beds and baggage fly on board, the men, half tipsy,
clutch at the rigging, the captain swears, the women scream and sob,
the crowd cheer and laugh, while one or two pretty little girls stand
still and cry outright, regardless of all eyes.
"These two days of comparative peace have quite set me on my legs
again. I was getting worn and weary with anxiety and work. As usual I
have been delighted with my shipwrights. I gave them some beer on
Saturday, making a short oration. To-day when they went ashore, and I
came on board, they gave three cheers, whether for me or the ship I
hardly know, but I had just bid them good-bye, and the ship was out of
hail; but I was startled and hardly liked to claim the compliment by
acknowledging it.
"_SS. Elba, May 25._
"My first intentions of a long journal have been fairly frustrated by
sea-sickness. On Tuesday last about noon we started from the Mersey in
very dirty weather, and were hardly out of the river when we met a
gale from the south-west and a heavy sea, both right in our teeth; and
the poor _Elba_ had a sad shaking. Had I not been very sea-sick, the
sight would have been exciting enough as I sat wrapped in my oilskins
on the bridge; [but] in spite of all my efforts to talk, to eat, and
to grin, I soon collapsed into imbecility; and I was heartily thankful
towards evening to find myself in bed.
"Next morning I fancied it grew quieter, and, as I listened, heard,
'Let go the anchor,' whereon I concluded we had run into Holyhead
Harbour, as was indeed the case. All that day we lay in Holyhead, but
I could neither read nor write nor draw. The captain of another
steamer which had put in came on board, and we all went for a walk on
the hill; and in the evening there was an exchange of presents. We
gave some tobacco, I think, and received a cat, two pounds of fresh
butter, a Cumberland ham, 'Westward Ho!' and Thackeray's 'English
Humourists.' I was astonished at receiving two such fair books from
the captain of a little coasting screw. Our captain said he [the
captain of the screw] had plenty of money, five or six hundred a year
at least. 'What in the world makes him go rolling about in such a
craft, then?' 'Why, I fancy he's reckless; he's desperate in love with
that girl I mentioned, and she won't look at him.' Our honest, fat,
old captain says this very grimly in his thick, broad voice.
"My head won't stand much writing yet, so I will run up and take a
look at the blue night sky off the coast of Portugal.
"_May 26._
"A nice lad of some two-and-twenty, A---- by name, goes out in a
nondescript capacity as part purser, part telegraph clerk, part
generally useful person. A---- was a great comfort during the miseries
[of the gale]; for when with a dead head wind and a heavy sea, plates,
books, papers, stomachs were being rolled about in sad confusion, we
generally managed to lie on our backs, and grin, and try discordant
staves of the 'Flowers of the Forest' and the 'Low-backed Car.' We
could sing and laugh, when we could do nothing else; though A---- was
ready to swear after each fit was past, that that was the first time
he had felt anything, and at this moment would declare in broad Scotch
that he'd never been sick at all, qualifying the oath with 'except for
a minute now and then.' He brought a cornet-à-piston to practise on,
having had three weeks' instructions on that melodious instrument; and
if you could hear the horrid sounds that come I especially at heavy
rolls. When I hint he is not improving, there comes a confession: 'I
don't feel quite right yet, you see!' But he blows away manfully, and
in self-defence I try to roar the tune louder.
"11.30 P.M.
"Long past Cape St. Vincent now. We went within about 400 yards of the
cliffs and lighthouse in a calm moonlight, with porpoises springing
from the sea, the men crooning long ballads as they lay idle on the
forecastle, and the sails flapping uncertain on the yards. As we
passed, there came a sudden breeze from land, hot and heavy-scented;
and now as I write its warm rich flavour contrasts strongly with the
salt air we have been breathing.
"I paced the deck with H----, the second mate, and in the quiet night
drew a confession that he was engaged to be married, and gave him a
world of good advice. He is a very nice, active, little fellow, with a
broad Scotch tongue and 'dirty, little rascal' appearance. He had a
sad disappointment at starting. Having been second mate on the last
voyage, when the first mate was discharged, he took charge of the
_Elba_ all the time she was in port, and of course looked forward to
being chief mate this trip. Liddell promised him the post. He had not
authority to do this; and when Newall heard of it, he appointed
another man. Fancy poor H---- having told all the men and, most of all,
his sweetheart! But more remains behind; for when it came to signing
articles, it turned out that O----, the new first mate, had not a
certificate which allowed him to have a second mate. Then came rather
an affecting scene. For H---- proposed to sign as chief (he having the
necessary higher certificate) but to act as second for the lower
wages. At first O---- would not give in, but offered to go as second.
But our brave little H---- said, no: 'The owners wished Mr. O---- to
be chief mate, and chief mate he should be.' So he carried the day,
signed as chief and acts as second. Shakespeare and Byron are his
favourite books. I walked into Byron a little, but can well understand
his stirring up a rough, young sailor's romance. I lent him 'Westward
Ho!' from the cabin; but to my astonishment he did not care much for
it; he said it smelt of the shilling railway library; perhaps I had
praised it too highly. Scott is his standard for novels. I am very
happy to find good taste by no means confined to gentlemen, H----
having no pretensions to that title. He is a man after my own heart.
"Then I came down to the cabin and heard young A----'s schemes for the
future. His highest picture is a commission in the Prince of
Vizianagram's irregular horse. His eldest brother is tutor to his
Highness's children, and grand vizier, and magistrate, and on his
Highness's household staff, and seems to be one of those Scotch
adventurers one meets with and hears of in queer berths--raising
cavalry, building palaces, and using some petty Eastern king's long
purse with their long Scotch heads.
"_Off Bona, June 4._
"I read your letter carefully, leaning back in a Maltese boat to
present the smallest surface of my body to a grilling sun, and sailing
from the _Elba_ to Cape Hamrah, about three miles distant. How we
fried and sighed! At last we reached land under Fort Geneva, and I was
carried ashore pick-a-back, and plucked the first flower I saw for
Annie. It was a strange scene, far more novel than I had imagined; the
high, steep banks covered with rich, spicy vegetation, of which I
hardly knew one plant. The dwarf palm with fan-like leaves, growing
about two feet high, formed the staple of the verdure. As we brushed
through them, the gummy leaves of a cistus stuck to the clothes: and
with its small white flower and yellow heart stood for our English
dog-rose. In place of heather, we had myrtle and lentisque with leaves
somewhat similar. That large bulb with long flat leaves? Do not touch
it if your hands are cut; the Arabs use it as blisters for their
horses. Is that the same sort? No, take that one up; it is the bulb of
a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted,
like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the
leaves we get a vegetable horsehair;--and eat the bottom of the centre
spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here
a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling
by abused civilisation:--fine hardy thistles, one of them bright
yellow, though;--honest, Scotch-looking, large daisies or
gowans;--potatoes here and there, looking but sickly; and dark sturdy
fig-trees, looking cool and at their ease in the burning sun.
"Here we are at Fort Genova, crowning the little point, a small old
building due to my old Genoese acquaintance who fought and traded
bravely once upon a time. A broken cannon of theirs forms the
threshold; and through a dark, low arch we enter upon broad terraces
sloping to the centre, from which rain-water may collect and run into
that well. Large-breeched French troopers lounge about and are most
civil; and the whole party sit down to breakfast in a little
white-washed room, from the door of which the long, mountain coastline
and the sparkling sea show of an impossible blue through the openings
of a white-washed rampart. I try a sea-egg, one of those prickly
fellows--sea-urchins, they are called sometimes; the shell is of a
lovely purple, and when opened there are rays of yellow adhering to
the inside; these I eat, but they are very fishy.
"We are silent and shy of one another, and soon go out to watch while
turbaned, blue-breeched, bare-legged Arabs dig holes for the land
telegraph posts on the following principle: one man takes a pick and
bangs lazily at the hard earth; when a little is loosened, his mate
with a small spade lifts it on one side; and _da capo_. They have
regular features, and look quite in place among the palms. Our English
workmen screw the earthenware insulators on the posts, strain the
wire, and order the Arabs about by the generic term of Johnny. I find
W---- has nothing for me to do; and that in fact no one has anything
to do. Some instruments for testing have stuck at Lyons, some at
Cagliari; and nothing can be done--or, at any rate, is done. I wander
about, thinking of you and staring at big, green
grasshoppers--locusts, some people call them--and smelling the rich
brushwood. There was nothing for a pencil to sketch, and I soon got
tired of this work, though I have paid willingly much money for far
less strange and lovely sights.
"_Off Cape Spartivento, June 8._
"At two this morning we left Cagliari; at five cast anchor here. I got
up and began preparing for the final trial; and shortly afterwards
every one else of note on board went ashore to make experiments on the
state of the cable, leaving me with the prospect of beginning to lift
at 12 o'clock. I was not ready by that time; but the experiments were
not concluded, and moreover the cable was found to be imbedded some
four or five feet in sand, so that the boat could not bring off the
end. At three, Messrs. Liddell, etc., came on board in good spirits,
having found two wires good, or in such a state as permitted messages
to be transmitted freely. The boat now went to grapple for the cable
some way from shore, while the _Elba_ towed a small lateen craft which
was to take back the consul to Cagliari some distance on its way. On
our return we found the boat had been unsuccessful; she was allowed to
drop astern, while we grappled for the cable in the _Elba_ [without
more success]. The coast is a low mountain range covered with
brushwood or heather--pools of water and a sandy beach at their feet.
I have not yet been ashore, my hands having been very full all day.
"_June 9._
"Grappling for the cable outside the bank had been voted too
uncertain; [and the day was spent in] efforts to pull the cable off
through the sand which has accumulated over it. By getting the cable
tight on to the boat, and letting the swell pitch her about till it
got slack, and then tightening again with blocks and pulleys, we
managed to get out from the beach towards the ship at the rate of
about twenty yards an hour. When they had got about 100 yards from
shore, we ran in round the _Elba_ to try and help them, letting go the
anchor in the shallowest possible water; this was about sunset.
Suddenly some one calls out he sees the cable at the bottom: there it
was, sure enough, apparently wriggling about as the waves rippled.
Great excitement; still greater when we find our own anchor is foul of
it and it has been the means of bringing it to light. We let go a
grapnel, get the cable clear of the anchor on to the grapnel--the
captain in an agony lest we should drift ashore meanwhile--hand the
grappling line into the big boat, steam out far enough, and anchor
again. A little more work and one end of the cable is up over the bows
round my drum. I go to my engine and we start hauling in. All goes
pretty well, but it is quite dark. Lamps are got at last, and men
arranged. We go on for a quarter of a mile or so from shore and then
stop at about half-past nine with orders to be up at three. Grand work
at last! A number of the _Saturday Review_ here: it reads so hot and
feverish, so tomb-like and unhealthy, in the midst of dear Nature's
hills and sea, with good wholesome work to do. Pray that all go well
to-morrow.
"_June 10._
"Thank heaven for a most fortunate day. At three o'clock this morning,
in a damp, chill mist, all hands were roused to work. With a small
delay, for one or two improvements I had seen to be necessary last
night, the engine started, and since that time I do not think there
has been half an hour's stoppage. A rope to splice, a block to change,
a wheel to oil, an old rusted anchor to disengage from the cable which
brought it up, these have been our only obstructions. Sixty, seventy,
eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty revolutions at last, my little
engine tears away. The even black rope comes straight out of the blue
heaving water; passes slowly round an open-hearted,
good-tempered-looking pulley, five feet diameter; aft past a vicious
nipper, to bring all up should anything go wrong; through a gentle
guide; on to a huge bluff drum, who wraps him round his body and says,
'Come you must,' as plain as drum can speak: the chattering pauls say,
'I've got him, I've got him, he can't get back': whilst black cable,
much slacker and easier in mind and body, is taken by a slim V-pulley
and passed down into the huge hold, where half a dozen men put him
comfortably to bed after his exertion in rising from his long bath. In
good sooth, it is one of the strangest sights I know to see that black
fellow rising up so steadily in the midst of the blue sea. We are more
than half way to the place where we expect the fault; and already the
one wire, supposed previously to be quite bad near the African coast,
can be spoken through. I am very glad I am here, for my machines are
my own children, and I look on their little failings with a parent's
eye and lead them into the path of duty with gentleness and firmness.
I am naturally in good spirits, but keep very quiet, for misfortunes
may arise at any instant; moreover, to-morrow my paying-out apparatus
will be wanted should all go well, and that will be another nervous
operation. Fifteen miles are safely in; but no one knows better than I
do that nothing is done till all is done.
"_June 11._
"9 A.M.--We have reached the splice supposed to be faulty, and no
fault has been found. The two men learned in electricity, L---- and
W----, squabble where the fault is.
"_Evening._--A weary day in a hot broiling sun; no air. After the
experiments, L---- said the fault might be ten miles ahead; by that
time we should be, according to a chart, in about a thousand fathoms
of water--rather more than a mile. It was most difficult to decide
whether to go on or not. I made preparations for a heavy pull, set
small things to rights and went to sleep. About four in the afternoon,
Mr. Liddell decided to proceed, and we are now (at seven) grinding in
at the rate of a mile and three-quarters per hour, which appears a
grand speed to us. If the paying-out only works well. I have just
thought of a great improvement in it; I can't apply it this time,
however.--The sea is of an oily calm, and a perfect fleet of brigs and
ships surrounds us, their sails hardly filling in the lazy breeze. The
sun sets behind the dim coast of the Isola San Pietro, the coast of
Sardinia high and rugged becomes softer and softer in the distance,
while to the westward still the isolated rock of Toro springs from the
horizon.--It would amuse you to see how cool (in head) and jolly
everybody is. A testy word now and then shows the wires are strained a
little, but every one laughs and makes his little jokes as if it were
all in fun: yet we are all as much in earnest as the most earnest of
the earnest bastard German school or demonstrative of Frenchmen. I
enjoy it very much.
"_June 12._
"5.30 A.M.--Out of sight of land: about thirty nautical miles in the
hold; the wind rising a little; experiments being made for a fault,
while the engine slowly revolves to keep us hanging at the same spot:
depth supposed about a mile. The machinery has behaved admirably. O
that the paying-out were over! The new machinery there is but rough,
meant for an experiment in shallow water, and here we are in a mile of
water.
"6.30.--I have made my calculations and find the new paying-out gear
cannot possibly answer at this depth, some portion would give way.
Luckily, I have brought the old things with me and am getting them
rigged up as fast as may be. Bad news from the cable. Number four has
given in some portion of the last ten miles: the fault in number three
is still at the bottom of the sea; number two is now the only good
wire; and the hold is getting in such a mess, through keeping bad bits
out and cutting for splicing and testing, that there will be great
risk in paying out. The cable is somewhat strained in its ascent from
one mile below us; what it will be when we get to two miles is a
problem we may have to determine.
"9 P.M.--A most provoking, unsatisfactory day. We have done nothing.
The wind and sea have both risen. Too little notice has been given to
the telegraphists who accompany this expedition; they had to leave all
their instruments at Lyons in order to arrive at Bona in time; our
tests are therefore of the roughest, and no one really knows where the
faults are. Mr. L---- in the morning lost much time; then he told us,
after we had been inactive for about eight hours, that the fault in
number three was within six miles; and at six o'clock in the evening,
when all was ready for a start to pick up these six miles, he comes
and says there must be a fault about thirty miles from Bona! By this
time it was too late to begin paying out to-day, and we must lie here
moored in a thousand fathoms till light to-morrow morning. The ship
pitches a good deal, but the wind is going down.
"_June 13, Sunday._
"The wind has not gone down however. It now (at 10.30) blows a pretty
stiff gale, the sea has also risen; and the _Elba's_ bows rise and
fall about 9 feet. We make twelve pitches to the minute, and the poor
cable must feel very sea-sick by this time. We are quite unable to do
anything, and continue riding at anchor in one thousand fathoms, the
engines going constantly so as to keep the ship's bows up to the
cable, which by this means hangs nearly vertical and sustains no
strain but that caused by its own weight and the pitching of the
vessel. We were all up at four, but the weather entirely forbade work
for to-day, so some went to bed and most lay down, making up our
leeway, as we nautically term our loss of sleep. I must say Liddell is
a fine fellow and keeps his patience and temper wonderfully; and yet
how he does fret and fume about trifles at home! This wind has blown
now for thirty-six hours, and yet we have telegrams from Bona to say
the sea there is as calm as a mirror. It makes one laugh to remember
one is still tied to the shore. Click, click, click, the pecker is at
work; I wonder what Herr P---- says to Herr L----; tests, tests,
tests, nothing more. This will be a very anxious day.
"_June 14._
"Another day of fatal inaction.
"_June 15._
"9.30.--The wind has gone down a deal; but even now there are doubts
whether we shall start to-day. When shall I get back to you?
"9 P.M.--Four miles from land. Our run has been successful and
eventless. Now the work is nearly over I feel a little out of
spirits--why, I should be puzzled to say--mere wantonness, or reaction
perhaps after suspense.
"_June 16._
"Up this morning at three, coupled my self-acting gear to the break,
and had the satisfaction of seeing it pay out the last four miles in
very good style. With one or two little improvements, I hope to make
it a capital thing. The end has just gone ashore in two boats, three
out of four wires good. Thus ends our first expedition. By some odd
chance a _Times_ of June the 7th has found its way on board through
the agency of a wretched old peasant who watches the end of the line
here. A long account of breakages in the Atlantic trial trip. To-night
we grapple for the heavy cable, eight tons to the mile. I long to
have a tug at him; he may puzzle me, and though misfortunes or rather
difficulties are a bore at the time, life when working with cables is
tame without them.
"2 P.M.--Hurrah, he is hooked, the big fellow, almost at the first
cast. He hangs under our bows, looking so huge and imposing that I
could find it in my heart to be afraid of him.
"_June 17._
"We went to a little bay called Chia, where a fresh-water stream falls
into the sea, and took in water. This is rather a long operation, so I
went a walk up the valley with Mr. Liddell. The coast here consists of
rocky mountains 800 to 1,000 feet high, covered with shrubs of a
brilliant green. On landing, our first amusement was watching the
hundreds of large fish who lazily swam in shoals about the river; the
big canes on the further side hold numberless tortoises, we are told,
but see none, for just now they prefer taking a siesta. A little
further on, and what is this with large pink flowers in such
abundance?--the oleander in full flower. At first I fear to pluck
them, thinking they must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the
banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink
and green. Set these in a little valley, framed by mountains whose
rocks gleam out blue and purple colours such as pre-Raphaelites only
dare attempt, shining out hard and weirdlike amongst the clumps of
castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor vitæ, and many other evergreens,
whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all
deep or brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse on the baked
deposit at the foot of these large crags. One or two half-savage
herdsmen in sheepskin kilts, etc., ask for cigars; partridges whirr up
on either side of us; pigeons coo and nightingales sing amongst the
blooming oleander. We get six sheep, and many fowls too, from the
priest of the small village; and then run back to Spartivento and make
preparations for the morning.
"_June 18._
"The big cable is stubborn, and will not behave like his smaller
brother. The gear employed to take him off the drum is not strong
enough; he gets slack on the drum and plays the mischief. Luckily for
my own conscience, the gear I had wanted was negatived by Mr. Newall.
Mr. Liddell does not exactly blame me, but he says we might have had a
silver pulley cheaper than the cost of this delay. He has telegraphed
for more men to Cagliari, to try to pull the cable off the drum into
the hold, by hand. I look as comfortable as I can, but feel as if
people were blaming me. I am trying my best to get something rigged
which may help us; I wanted a little difficulty, and feel much
better.--The short length we have picked up was covered at places with
beautiful sprays of coral, twisted and twined with shells of those
small, fairy animals we saw in the aquarium at home; poor little
things, they died at once, with their little bells and delicate bright
tints.
"_12 o'clock._--Hurrah, victory! for the present anyhow. Whilst in our
first dejection, I thought I saw a place where a flat roller would
remedy the whole misfortune; but a flat roller at Cape Spartivento,
hard, easily unshipped, running freely! There was a grooved pulley
used for the paying-out machinery with a spindle wheel, which might
suit me. I filled him up with tarry spunyarn, nailed sheet copper
round him, bent some parts in the fire; and we are paying-in without
more trouble now. You would think some one would praise me; no--no
more praise than blame before; perhaps now they think better of me,
though.
"10 P.M.--We have gone on very comfortably for nearly six miles. An
hour and a half was spent washing down; for along with many coloured
polypi, from corals, shells, and insects, the big cable brings up much
mud and rust, and makes a fishy smell by no means pleasant: the bottom
seems to teem with life.--But now we are startled by a most
unpleasant, grinding noise; which appeared at first to come from the
large low pulley, but when the engines stopped, the noise continued;
and we now imagine it is something slipping down the cable, and the
pulley but acts as sounding-board to the big fiddle. Whether it is
only an anchor or one of the two other cables, we know not. We hope it
is not the cable just laid down.
"_June 19._
"10 A.M.--All our alarm groundless, it would appear: the odd noise
ceased after a time, and there was no mark sufficiently strong on the
large cable to warrant the suspicion that we had cut another line
through. I stopped up on the look-out till three in the morning, which
made 23 hours between sleep and sleep. One goes dozing about, though,
most of the day, for it is only when something goes wrong that one has
to look alive. Hour after hour I stand on the forecastle-head, picking
off little specimens of polypi and coral, or lie on the saloon deck
reading back numbers of the _Times_--till something hitches, and then
all is hurly-burly once more. There are awnings all along the ship,
and a most ancient, fish-like smell beneath.
"_1 o'clock._--Suddenly a great strain in only 95 fathoms of
water--belts surging and general dismay; grapnels being thrown out in
the hope of finding what holds the cable.--Should it prove the young
cable! We are apparently crossing its path--not the working one, but
the lost child; Mr. Liddell _would_ start the big one first, though it
was laid first: he wanted to see the job done, and meant to leave us
to the small one unaided by his presence.
"3.30.--Grapnel caught something, lost it again; it left its marks on
the prongs. Started lifting gear again; and after hauling in some 50
fathoms--grunt, grunt, grunt--we hear the other cable slipping down
our big one, playing the self-same tune we heard last night--louder,
however.
"10 P.M.--The pull on the deck engines became harder and harder. I got
steam up in a boiler on deck, and another little engine starts hauling
at the grapnel. I wonder if there ever was such a scene of confusion;
Mr. Liddell and W---- and the captain all giving orders contradictory,
etc., on the forecastle; D----, the foreman of our men, the mates,
etc., following the example of our superiors; the ship's engine and
boilers below, a 50-horse engine on deck, a boiler 14 feet long on
deck beside it, a little steam-winch tearing round; a dozen Italians
(20 have come to relieve our hands, the men we telegraphed for to
Cagliari) hauling at the rope; wire-men, sailors, in the crevices left
by ropes and machinery; everything that could swear swearing--I found
myself swearing like a trooper at last. We got the unknown difficulty
within ten fathoms of the surface; but then the forecastle got
frightened that, if it was the small cable which we had got hold of,
we should certainly break it by continuing the tremendous and
increasing strain. So at last Mr. Liddell decided to stop; cut the big
cable, buoying its end; go back to our pleasant watering-place at
Chia, take more water and start lifting the small cable. The end of
the large one has even now regained its sandy bed; and three
buoys--one to grapnel foul of the supposed small cable, two to the big
cable--are dipping about on the surface. One more--a flag-buoy--will
soon follow, and then straight for shore.
"_June 20._
"It is an ill-wind, etc. I have an unexpected opportunity of
forwarding this engineering letter; for the craft which brought out
our Italian sailors must return to Cagliari to-night, as the little
cable will take us nearly to Galita, and the Italian skipper could
hardly find his way from thence. To-day--Sunday--not much rest. Mr.
Liddell is at Spartivento telegraphing. We are at Chia, and shall
shortly go to help our boat's crew in getting the small cable on
board. We dropped them some time since in order that they might dig it
out of the sand as far as possible.
"_June 21._
"Yesterday--Sunday as it was--all hands were kept at work all day,
coaling, watering, and making a futile attempt to pull the cable from
the shore on board through the sand. This attempt was rather silly
after the experience we had gained at Cape Spartivento. This morning
we grappled, hooked the cable at once, and have made an excellent
start. Though I have called this the small cable, it is much larger
than the Bona one.--Here comes a break-down, and a bad one.
"_June 22._
"We got over it however; but it is a warning to me that my future
difficulties will arise from parts wearing out. Yesterday the cable
was often a lovely sight, coming out of the water one large
incrustation of delicate, net-like corals and long white curling
shells. No portion of the dirty black wires was visible; instead we
had a garland of soft pink with little scarlet sprays and white enamel
intermixed. All was fragile, however, and could hardly be secured in
safety; and inexorable iron crushed the tender leaves to atoms.--This
morning at the end of my watch, about 4 o'clock, we came to the buoys,
proving our anticipations right concerning the crossing of the cables.
I went to bed for four hours, and on getting up, found a sad mess. A
tangle of the six-wire cable hung to the grapnel, which had been left
buoyed, and the small cable had parted and is lost for the present.
Our hauling of the other day must have done the mischief.
"_June 23._
"We contrived to get the two ends of the large cable and to pick the
short end up. The long end, leading us seaward, was next put round the
drum, and a mile of it picked up; but then, fearing another tangle,
the end was cut and buoyed, and we returned to grapple for the
three-wire cable. All this is very tiresome for me. The buoying and
dredging are managed entirely by W----, who has had much experience in
this sort of thing; so I have not enough to do, and get very homesick.
At noon the wind freshened and the sea rose so high that we had to run
for land, and are once more this evening anchored at Chia.
"_June 24._
"The whole day spent in dredging without success. This operation
consists in allowing the ship to drift slowly across the line where
you expect the cable to be, while at the end of a long rope, fast
either to the bow or stern, a grapnel drags along the ground. This
grapnel is a small anchor, made like four pot-hooks tied back to back.
When the rope gets taut, the ship is stopped and the grapnel hauled up
to the surface in the hopes of finding the cable on its prongs.--I am
much discontented with myself for idly lounging about and reading
'Westward Ho!' for the second time, instead of taking to electricity
or picking up nautical information. I am uncommonly idle. The sea is
not quite so rough, but the weather is squally and the rain comes in
frequent gusts.
"_June 25._
"To-day about 1 o'clock we hooked the three-wire cable, buoyed the
long sea end, and picked up the short [or shore] end. Now it is dark,
and we must wait for morning before lifting the buoy we lowered to-day
and proceeding seawards.--The depth of water here is about 600 feet,
the height of a respectable English hill; our fishing line was about a
quarter of a mile long. It blows pretty fresh, and there is a great
deal of sea.
"_26th._
"This morning it came on to blow so heavily that it was impossible to
take up our buoy. The _Elba_ recommenced rolling in true Baltic style,
and towards noon we ran for land.
"_27th, Sunday._
"This morning was a beautiful calm. We reached the buoys at about 4.30
and commenced picking up at 6.30. Shortly a new cause of anxiety
arose. Kinks came up in great quantities, about thirty in the hour. To
have a true conception of a kink, you must see one; it is a loop drawn
tight, all the wires get twisted and the gutta-percha inside pushed
out. These much diminish the value of the cable, as they must all be
cut out, the gutta-percha made good, and the cable spliced. They arise
from the cable having been badly laid down, so that it forms folds and
tails at the bottom of the sea. These kinks have another disadvantage:
they weaken the cable very much.--At about six o'clock [P.M.] we had
some twelve miles lifted, when I went to the bows; the kinks were
exceedingly tight and were giving way in a most alarming manner. I got
a cage rigged up to prevent the end (if it broke) from hurting any
one, and sat down on the bowsprit, thinking I should describe kinks to
Annie:--suddenly I saw a great many coils and kinks altogether at the
surface. I jumped to the gutta-percha pipe, by blowing through which
the signal is given to stop the engine. I blow, but the engine does
not stop: again--no answer; the coils and kinks jam in the bows and I
rush aft shouting Stop! Too late: the cable had parted and must lie in
peace at the bottom. Some one had pulled the gutta-percha tube across
a bare part of the steam pipe and melted it. It had been used hundreds
of times in the last few days and gave no symptoms of failing. I
believe the cable must have gone at any rate; however, since it went
in my watch, and since I might have secured the tubing more strongly,
I feel rather sad....
"_June 28._
"Since I could not go to Annie I took down Shakespeare, and by the
time I had finished _Antony and Cleopatra_, read the second half of
_Troilus_ and got some way in _Coriolanus_, I felt it was childish to
regret the accident had happened in my watch, and moreover I felt
myself not much to blame in the tubing matter--it had been torn down,
it had not fallen down; so I went to bed, and slept without fretting,
and woke this morning in the same good mood--for which thank you and
our friend Shakespeare. I am happy to say Mr. Liddell said the loss of
the cable did not much matter; though this would have been no
consolation had I felt myself to blame.--This morning we have grappled
for and found another length of small cable which Mr. ---- dropped in
100 fathoms of water. If this also gets full of kinks, we shall
probably have to cut it after 10 miles or so, or, more probably still,
it will part of its own free will or weight.
"10 P.M.--This second length of three-wire cable soon got into the
same condition as its fellow--_i.e._ came up twenty kinks an hour--and
after seven miles were in, parted on the pulley over the bows at one
of the said kinks: during my watch again, but this time no earthly
power could have saved it. I had taken all manner of precautions to
prevent the end doing any damage when the smash came, for come I knew
it must. We now return to the six-wire cable. As I sat watching the
cable to-night, large phosphorescent globes kept rolling from it and
fading in the black water.
"_29th._
"To-day we returned to the buoy we had left at the end of the six-wire
cable, and after much trouble from a series of tangles, got a fair
start at noon. You will easily believe a tangle of iron rope inch and
a half diameter is not easy to unravel, especially with a ton or so
hanging to the ends. It is now eight o'clock, and we have about six
and a half miles safe: it becomes very exciting, however, for the
kinks are coming fast and furious.
"_July 2._
"Twenty-eight miles safe in the hold. The ship is now so deep that the
men are to be turned out of their aft hold, and the remainder coiled
there; so the good _Elba's_ nose need not burrow too far into the
waves. There can only be about 10 or 12 miles more, but these weigh 80
or 100 tons.
"_July 5._
"Our first mate was much hurt in securing a buoy on the evening of the
2nd. As interpreter [with the Italians] I am useful in all these
cases; but for no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes
continually. Pain is a terrible thing.--Our work is done: the whole of
the six-wire cable has been recovered; only a small part of the
three-wire, but that wire was bad and, owing to its twisted state, the
value small. We may therefore be said to have been very successful."
II
I have given this cruise nearly in full. From the notes, unhappily
imperfect, of two others, I will take only specimens; for in all there
are features of similarity, and it is possible to have too much even of
submarine telegraphy and the romance of engineering. And first from the
cruise of 1859 in the Greek Islands and to Alexandria, take a few
traits, incidents, and pictures.
"_May 10, 1859._
"We had a fair wind, and we did very well, seeing a little bit of
Cerigo or Cythera, and lots of turtle-doves wandering about over the
sea and perching, tired and timid, in the rigging of our little craft.
Then Falconera, Antimilo and Milo, topped with huge white clouds,
barren, deserted, rising bold and mysterious from the blue chafing
sea;--Argentiera, Siphano, Scapho, Paros, Antiparos, and late at night
Syra itself. 'Adam Bede' in one hand, a sketch-book in the other,
lying on rugs under an awning, I enjoyed a very pleasant day.
"_May 14._
"Syra is semi-Eastern. The pavement, huge shapeless blocks sloping to
a central gutter; from this bare two-storied houses, sometimes plaster
many-coloured, sometimes rough-hewn marble, rise, dirty and
ill-finished, to straight, plain, flat roofs; shops guiltless of
windows, with signs in Greek letters; dogs, Greeks in blue, baggy,
Zouave breeches and a fez, a few narghilehs and a sprinkling of the
ordinary continental shopboys.--In the evening I tried one more walk
in Syra with A----, but in vain endeavoured to amuse myself or to
spend money; the first effort resulting in singing 'Doodah' to a
passing Greek or two, the second in spending, no, in making A----
spend, threepence on coffee for three.
"_May 16._
"On coming on deck, I found we were at anchor in Canea bay, and saw
one of the most lovely sights man could witness. Far on either hand
stretch bold mountain capes, Spada and Maleka, tender in colour, bold
in outline; rich sunny levels lie beneath them, framed by the azure
sea. Right in front, a dark brown fortress girdles white mosques and
minarets. Rich and green, our mountain capes here join to form a
setting for the town, in whose dark walls--still darker--open a dozen
high-arched caves in which the huge Venetian galleys used to lie in
wait. High above all, higher and higher yet, up into the firmament,
range after range of blue and snow-capped mountains. I was bewildered
and amazed, having heard nothing of this great beauty. The town when
entered is quite Eastern. The streets are formed of open stalls under
the first story, in which squat tailors, cooks, sherbet-vendors and
the like, busy at their work or smoking narghilehs. Cloths stretched
from house to house keep out the sun. Mules rattle through the crowd;
curs yelp between your legs; negroes are as hideous and bright clothed
as usual; grave Turks with long chibouques continue to march solemnly
without breaking them; a little Arab in one dirty rag pokes fun at two
splendid little Turks with brilliant fezzes; wiry mountaineers in
dirty, full, white kilts, shouldering long guns and one hand on their
pistols, stalk untamed past a dozen Turkish soldiers, who look
sheepish and brutal in worn cloth jacket and cotton trousers. A
headless, wingless lion of St. Mark still stands upon a gate, and has
left the mark of his strong clutch. Of ancient times when Crete was
Crete not a trace remains; save perhaps in the full, well-cut nostril
and firm tread of that mountaineer, and I suspect that even his sires
were Albanians, mere outer barbarians.
"_May 17._
"I spent the day at the little station where the cable was landed,
which has apparently been first a Venetian monastery and then a
Turkish mosque. At any rate the big dome is very cool, and the little
ones hold [our electric] batteries capitally. A handsome young
Bashi-bazouk guards it, and a still handsomer mountaineer is the
servant; so I draw them and the monastery and the hill, till I'm black
in the face with heat, and come on board to hear the Canea cable is
still bad.
"_May 23._
"We arrived in the morning at the east end of Candia, and had a
glorious scramble over the mountains, which seem built of adamant.
Time has worn away the softer portions of the rock, only leaving sharp
jagged edges of steel. Sea-eagles soaring above our heads; old tanks,
ruins and desolation at our feet. The ancient Arsinoë stood here; a
few blocks of marble with the cross attest the presence of Venetian
Christians; but now--the desolation of desolations. Mr. Liddell and I
separated from the rest, and when we had found a sure bay for the
cable, had a tremendous lively scramble back to the boat. These are
the bits of our life which I enjoy, which have some poetry, some
grandeur in them.
"_May 29_ (?).
"Yesterday we ran round to the new harbour [of Alexandria], landed the
shore-end of the cable close to Cleopatra's bath, and made a very
satisfactory start about one in the afternoon. We had scarcely gone
200 yards when I noticed that the cable ceased to run out, and I
wondered why the ship had stopped. People ran aft to tell me not to
put such a strain on the cable; I answered indignantly that there was
no strain; and suddenly it broke on every one in the ship at once that
we were aground. Here was a nice mess. A violent scirocco blew from
the land; making one's skin feel as if it belonged to some one else
and didn't fit, making the horizon dim and yellow with fine sand,
oppressing every sense and raising the thermometer 20 degrees in an
hour, but making calm water round us, which enabled the ship to lie
for the time in safety. The wind might change at any moment, since the
scirocco was only accidental; and at the first wave from seaward bump
would go the poor ship, and there would [might] be an end of our
voyage. The captain, without waiting to sound, began to make an effort
to put the ship over what was supposed to be a sandbank; but by the
time soundings were made this was found to be impossible, and he had
only been jamming the poor _Elba_ faster on a rock. Now every effort
was made to get her astern, an anchor taken out, a rope brought to a
winch I had for the cable, and the engines backed; but all in vain. A
small Turkish Government steamer, which is to be our consort, came to
our assistance, but of course very slowly, and much time was occupied
before we could get a hawser to her. I could do no good after having
made a chart of the soundings round the ship, and went at last on to
the bridge to sketch the scene. But at that moment the strain from the
winch and a jerk from the Turkish steamer got off the boat, after we
had been some hours aground. The carpenter reported that she had made
only two inches of water in one compartment; the cable was still
uninjured astern, and our spirits rose; when--will you believe
it?--after going a short distance astern, the pilot ran us once more
fast aground on what seemed to me nearly the same spot. The very same
scene was gone through as on the first occasion, and dark came on
whilst the wind shifted, and we were still aground. Dinner was served
up, but poor Mr. Liddell could eat very little; and bump, bump, grind,
grind, went the ship fifteen or sixteen times as we sat at dinner. The
slight sea, however, did enable us to bump off. This morning we appear
not to have suffered in any way; but a sea is rolling in, which a few
hours ago would have settled the poor old _Elba_.
"_June --._
"The Alexandria cable has again failed; after paying out two-thirds of
the distance successfully, an unlucky touch in deep water snapped the
line. Luckily the accident occurred in Mr. Liddell's watch. Though
personally it may not really concern me, the accident weighs like a
personal misfortune. Still, I am glad I was present: a failure is
probably more instructive than a success; and this experience may
enable us to avoid misfortune in still greater undertakings.
"_June --._
"We left Syra the morning after our arrival on Saturday the 4th. This
we did (first) because we were in a hurry to do something, and
(second) because, coming from Alexandria, we had four days' quarantine
to perform. We were all mustered along the side while the doctor
counted us; the letters were popped into a little tin box and taken
away to be smoked; the guardians put on board to see that we held no
communication with the shore--without them we should still have had
four more days' quarantine; and with twelve Greek sailors besides, we
started merrily enough picking up the Canea cable.... To our utter
dismay, the yarn covering began to come up quite decayed, and the
cable, which when laid should have borne half a ton, was now in danger
of snapping with a tenth part of that strain. We went as slow as
possible in fear of a break at every instant. My watch was from eight
to twelve in the morning, and during that time we had barely secured
three miles of cable. Once it broke inside the ship, but I seized hold
of it in time--the weight being hardly anything--and the line for the
nonce was saved. Regular nooses were then planted inboard with men to
draw them taut, should the cable break inboard. A----, who should have
relieved me, was unwell, so I had to continue my look-out; and about
one o'clock the line again parted, but was again caught in the last
noose, with about four inches to spare. Five minutes afterwards it
again parted, and was yet once more caught. Mr. Liddell (whom I had
called) could stand this no longer; so we buoyed the line and ran into
a bay in Siphano, waiting for calm weather, though I was by no means
of opinion that the slight sea and wind had been the cause of our
failures.--All next day (Monday) we lay off Siphano, amusing ourselves
on shore with fowling-pieces and navy revolvers. I need not say we
killed nothing; and luckily we did not wound any of ourselves. A
guardiano accompanied us, his functions being limited to preventing
actual contact with the natives, for they might come as near, and talk
as much as they pleased. These isles of Greece are sad, interesting
places. They are not really barren all over, but they are quite
destitute of verdure; and tufts of thyme, wild mastic or mint, though
they sound well, are not nearly so pretty as grass. Many little
churches, glittering white, dot the islands; most of them, I believe,
abandoned during the whole year, with the exception of one day sacred
to their patron saint. The villages are mean, but the inhabitants do
not look wretched, and the men are good sailors. There is something in
this Greek race yet; they will become a powerful Levantine nation in
the course of time.--What a lovely moonlight evening that was! the
barren island cutting the clear sky with fantastic outline, marble
cliffs on either hand fairly gleaming over the calm sea. Next day, the
wind still continuing, I proposed a boating excursion, and decoyed
A----, L----, and S---- into accompanying me. We took the little gig,
and sailed away merrily enough round a point to a beautiful white bay,
flanked with two glistening little churches, fronted by beautiful
distant islands; when suddenly, to my horror, I discovered the _Elba_
steaming full speed out from the island. Of course we steered after
her; but the wind that instant ceased, and we were left in a dead
calm. There was nothing for it but to unship the mast, get out the
oars and pull. The ship was nearly certain to stop at the buoy; and I
wanted to learn how to take an oar, so here was a chance with a
vengeance! L---- steered, and we three pulled--a broiling pull it was
about half way across to Palikandro; still we did come in, pulling an
uncommon good stroke, and I had learned to hang on my oar. L---- had
pressed me to let him take my place; but though I was very tired at
the end of the first quarter of an hour, and then every successive
half hour, I would not give in. I nearly paid dear for my obstinacy,
however; for in the evening I had alternate fits of shivering and
burning."
III
The next extracts, and I am sorry to say the last, are from Fleeming's
letters of 1860, when he was back at Bona and Spartivento, and for the
first time at the head of an expedition. Unhappily these letters are
not only the last, but the series is quite imperfect; and this is the
more to be lamented as he had now begun to use a pen more skilfully, and
in the following notes there is at times a touch of real distinction in
the manner.
"_Cagliari, October 5, 1860._
"All Tuesday I spent examining what was on board the _Elba_, and
trying to start the repairs of the Spartivento land line, which has
been entirely neglected--and no wonder, for no one has been paid for
three months, no, not even the poor guards who have to keep
themselves, their horses and their families, on their pay. Wednesday
morning, I started for Spartivento, and got there in time to try a
good many experiments. Spartivento looks more wild and savage than
ever, but is not without a strange deadly beauty: the hills covered
with bushes of a metallic green with coppery patches of soil in
between; the valleys filled with dry salt mud and a little stagnant
water; where that very morning the deer had drunk, where herons,
curlews, and other fowl abound, and where, alas! malaria is breeding
with this rain. (No fear for those who do not sleep on shore.) A
little iron hut had been placed there since 1858; but the windows had
been carried off, the door broken down, the roof pierced all over. In
it we sat to make experiments; and how it recalled Birkenhead! There
was Thomson, there was my testing-board, the strings of gutta-percha;
Harry P---- even battering with the batteries; but where was my
darling Annie? Whilst I sat, feet in sand, with Harry alone inside the
hut--mats, coats, and wood to darken the window--the others visited
the murderous old friar, who is of the order of Scaloppi, and for whom
I brought a letter from his superior, ordering him to pay us
attention; but he was away from home, gone to Cagliari in a boat with
the produce of the farm belonging to his convent. Then they visited
the tower of Chia, but could not get in because the door is thirty
feet off the ground; so they came back and pitched a magnificent tent
which I brought from the _Bahiana_ a long time ago--and where they
will live (if I mistake not) in preference to the friar's or the owl-
and bat-haunted tower. MM. T---- and S---- will be left there: T---- an
intelligent, hard-working Frenchman with whom I am well pleased; he
can speak English and Italian well, and has been two years at Genoa.
S---- is a French German with a face like an ancient Gaul, who has
been sergeant-major in the French line, and who is, I see, a great,
big, muscular _fainéant_. We left the tent pitched and some stores in
charge of a guide, and ran back to Cagliari.
"Certainly being at the head of things is pleasanter than being
subordinate. We all agree very well; and I have made the testing
office into a kind of private room, where I can come and write to you
undisturbed, surrounded by my dear, bright brass things which all of
them remind me of our nights at Birkenhead. Then I can work here too,
and try lots of experiments; you know how I like that! and now and
then I read--Shakespeare principally. Thank you so much for making me
bring him: I think I must get a pocket edition of _Hamlet_ and _Henry
the Fifth_, so as never to be without them.
"_Cagliari, October 7._
"[The town was full?] ... of red-shirted English Garibaldini. A very
fine-looking set of fellows they are too: the officers rather raffish,
but with medals, Crimean and Indian; the men a very sturdy set, with
many lads of good birth I should say. They still wait their consort
the _Emperor_, and will, I fear, be too late to do anything. I meant
to have called on them, but they are all gone into barracks some way
from the town, and I have been much too busy to go far.
"The view from the ramparts was very strange and beautiful. Cagliari
rises on a very steep rock, at the mouth of a wide plain circled by
large hills and three-quarters filled with lagoons; it looks,
therefore, like an old island citadel. Large heaps of salt mark the
border between the sea and the lagoons; thousands of flamingoes whiten
the centre of the huge shallow marsh; hawks hover and scream among the
trees under the high mouldering battlements.--A little lower down, the
band played. Men and ladies bowed and pranced, the costumes posed,
church bells tinkled, processions processed, the sun set behind thick
clouds capping the hills; I pondered on you and enjoyed it all.
"Decidedly I prefer being master to being man: boats at all hours,
stewards flying for marmalade, captain inquiring when ship is to sail,
clerks to copy my writing, the boat to steer when we go out--I have
run her nose on several times; decidedly, I begin to feel quite a
little king. Confound the cable, though! I shall never be able to
repair it.
"_Bona, October 14._
"We left Cagliari at 4.30 on the 9th, and soon got to Spartivento. I
repeated some of my experiments, but found Thomson, who was to have
been my grand stand-by, would not work on that day in the wretched
little hut. Even if the windows and door had been put in, the wind,
which was very high, made the lamp flicker about and blew it out; so I
sent on board and got old sails, and fairly wrapped the hut up in
them; and then we were as snug as could be, and I left the hut in
glorious condition, with a nice little stove in it. The tent which
should have been forthcoming from the curé's for the guards had gone
to Cagliari; but I found another, [a] green, Turkish tent, in the
_Elba_, and soon had him up. The square tent left on the last occasion
was standing all right and tight in spite of wind and rain. We landed
provisions, two beds, plates, knives, forks, candles, cooking
utensils, and were ready for a start at 6 P.M.; but the wind meanwhile
had come on to blow at such a rate that I thought better of it, and
we stopped. T---- and S---- slept ashore, however, to see how they
liked it; at least they tried to sleep, for S----, the ancient
sergeant-major, had a toothache, and T---- thought the tent was coming
down every minute. Next morning they could only complain of sand and a
leaky coffee-pot, so I leave them with a good conscience. The little
encampment looked quite picturesque: the green round tent, the square
white tent, and the hut all wrapped up in sails, on a sandhill,
looking on the sea and masking those confounded marshes at the back.
One would have thought the Cagliaritans were in a conspiracy to
frighten the two poor fellows, who (I believe) will be safe enough if
they do not go into the marshes after nightfall. S---- brought a
little dog to amuse them,--such a jolly, ugly little cur without a
tail, but full of fun; he will be better than quinine.
"The wind drove a barque, which had anchored near us for shelter, out
to sea. We started, however, at 2 P.M., and had a quick passage, but a
very rough one, getting to Bona by daylight [on the 11th]. Such a
place as this is for getting anything done! The health boat went away
from us at 7.30 with W---- on board; and we heard nothing of them till
9.30, when W---- came back with two fat Frenchmen, who are to look on
on the part of the Government. They are exactly alike: only one has
four bands and the other three round his cap, and so I know them. Then
I sent a boat round to Fort Gênois [Fort Geneva of 1858], where the
cable is landed, with all sorts of things and directions, whilst I
went ashore to see about coals and a room at the fort. We hunted
people in the little square, in their shops and offices, but only
found them in cafés. One amiable gentleman wasn't up at 9.30, was out
at 10, and as soon as he came back the servant said he would go to bed
and not get up till 3: he came however to find us at a café, and said
that, on the contrary, two days in the week he did not do so! Then my
two fat friends must have their breakfast after their 'something' at a
café; and all the shops shut from 10 to 2; and the post does not open
till 12; and there was a road to Fort Gênois, only a bridge had been
carried away, etc. At last I got off, and we rowed round to Fort
Gênois, where my men had put up a capital gipsy tent with sails, and
there was my big board and Thomson's number 5 in great glory. I soon
came to the conclusion there was a break. Two of my faithful
Cagliaritans slept all night in the little tent, to guard it and my
precious instruments; and the sea, which was rather rough, silenced my
Frenchmen.
"Next day I went on with my experiments, whilst a boat grappled for
the cable a little way from shore, and buoyed it where the _Elba_
could get hold. I brought all back to the _Elba_, tried my machinery,
and was all ready for a start next morning. But the wretched coal had
not come yet; Government permission from Algiers to be got; lighters,
men, baskets, and I know not what forms to be got or got through--and
everybody asleep! Coals or no coals, I was determined to start next
morning; and start we did at four in the morning, picked up the buoy
with our deck-engine, popped the cable across a boat, tested the wires
to make sure the fault was not behind us, and started picking up at
11. Everything worked admirably, and about 2 P.M. in came the fault.
There is no doubt the cable was broken by coral-fishers; twice they
have had it up to their own knowledge.
"Many men have been ashore to-day and have come back tipsy, and the
whole ship is in a state of quarrel from top to bottom, and they will
gossip just within my hearing. And we have had moreover three French
gentlemen and a French lady to dinner, and I had to act host and try
to manage the mixtures to their taste. The good-natured little
Frenchwoman was most amusing; when I asked her if she would have some
apple tart--'_Mon Dieu_,' with heroic resignation, '_je veux bien_';
or a little _plombodding_--'_Mais ce que vous voudrez, Monsieur!_'
"_SS. Elba, somewhere not far from Bona, Oct. 19._
"Yesterday [after three previous days of useless grappling] was
destined to be very eventful. We began dredging at daybreak, and
hooked at once every time in rocks; but by capital luck, just as we
were deciding it was no use to continue in that place, we hooked the
cable: up it came, was tested, and lo! another complete break, a
quarter of a mile off. I was amazed at my own tranquillity under these
disappointments, but I was not really half so fussy as about getting a
cab. Well, there was nothing for it but grappling again, and, as you
may imagine, we were getting about six miles from shore. But the water
did not deepen rapidly; we seemed to be on the crest of a kind of
submarine mountain in prolongation of Cape de Gonde, and pretty havoc
we must have made with the crags. What rocks we did hook! No sooner
was the grapnel down than the ship was anchored; and then came such a
business: ship's engines going, deck-engine thundering, belt slipping,
fear of breaking ropes: actually breaking grapnels. It was always an
hour or more before we could get the grapnel down again. At last we
had to give up the place, though we knew we were close to the cable,
and go farther to sea in much deeper water; to my great fear, as I
knew the cable was much eaten away and would stand but little strain.
Well, we hooked the cable first dredge this time, and pulled it slowly
and gently to the top, with much trepidation. Was it the cable? was
there any weight on? it was evidently too small. Imagine my dismay
when the cable did come up, but hanging loosely, thus:
[Illustration]
instead of taut, thus:
[Illustration]
showing certain signs of a break close by. For a moment I felt
provoked, as I thought 'Here we are, in deep water, and the cable will
not stand lifting!' I tested at once, and by the very first wire found
it had broken towards shore and was good towards sea. This was of
course very pleasant: but from that time to this, though the wires
test very well, not a signal has come from Spartivento. I got the
cable into a boat, and a gutta-percha line from the ship to the boat,
and we signalled away at a great rate--but no signs of life. The tests
however make me pretty sure one wire at least is good; so I determined
to lay down cable from where we were to the shore, and go to
Spartivento to see what had happened there. I fear my men are ill. The
night was lovely, perfectly calm; so we lay close to the boat and
signals were continually sent, but with no result. This morning I had
the cable down to Fort Gênois in style; and now we are picking up odds
and ends of cable between the different breaks, and getting our buoys
on board, etc. To-morrow I expect to leave for Spartivento."
IV
And now I am quite at an end of journal-keeping; diaries and diary
letters being things of youth which Fleeming had at length outgrown. But
one or two more fragments from his correspondence may be taken, and
first this brief sketch of the laying of the Norderney cable; mainly
interesting as showing under what defects of strength and in what
extremities of pain this cheerful man must at times continue to go about
his work.
"I slept on board 29th September, having arranged everything to start
by daybreak from where we lay in the roads: but at daybreak a heavy
mist hung over us so that nothing of land or water could be seen. At
midday it lifted suddenly, and away we went with perfect weather, but
could not find the buoys Forde left, that evening. I saw the captain
was not strong in navigation, and took matters next day much more into
my own hands, and before nine o'clock found the buoys (the weather had
been so fine we had anchored in the open sea near Texel). It took us
till the evening to reach the buoys, get the cable on board, test the
first half, speak to Lowestoft, make the splice, and start. H---- had
not finished his work at Norderney, so I was alone on board for
Reuter. Moreover the buoys to guide us in our course were not placed,
and the captain had very vague ideas about keeping his course; so I
had to do a good deal, and only lay down as I was for two hours in the
night. I managed to run the course perfectly. Everything went well,
and we found Norderney just where we wanted it next afternoon, and if
the shore-end had been laid, could have finished there and then,
October 1st. But when we got to Norderney, we found the _Caroline_
with shore-end lying apparently aground, and could not understand her
signals; so we had to anchor suddenly, and I went off in a small boat
with the captain to the _Caroline_. It was cold by this time, and my
arm was rather stiff, and I was tired; I hauled myself up on board the
_Caroline_ by a rope, and found H---- and two men on board. All the
rest were trying to get the shore-end on shore, but had failed, and
apparently had stuck on shore, and the waves were getting up. We had
anchored in the right place, and next morning we hoped the shore-end
would be laid, so we had only to go back. It was of course still
colder, and quite night. I went to bed and hoped to sleep, but, alas,
the rheumatism got into the joints and caused me terrible pain, so
that I could not sleep. I bore it as long as I could in order to
disturb no one, for all were tired; but at last I could bear it no
longer, and I managed to wake the steward, and got a mustard poultice,
which took the pain from the shoulder; but then the elbow got very
bad, and I had to call the second steward and get a second poultice,
and then it was daylight, and I felt very ill and feverish. The sea
was now rather rough--too rough rather for small boats, but luckily a
sort of thing called a scoot came out, and we got on board her with
some trouble, and got on shore after a good tossing about, which made
us all sea-sick. The cable sent from the _Caroline_ was just 60 yards
too short, and did not reach the shore, so although the _Caroline_ did
make the splice late that night, we could neither test nor speak.
Reuter was at Norderney, and I had to do the best I could, which was
not much, and went to bed early; I thought I should never sleep again,
but in sheer desperation got up in the middle of the night and gulped
a lot of raw whisky, and slept at last. But not long. A Mr. F----
washed my face and hands and dressed me; and we hauled the cable out
of the sea, and got it joined to the telegraph station, and on October
3rd telegraphed to Lowestoft first, and then to London. Miss Clara
Volkman, a niece of Mr. Reuter's, sent the first message to Mrs.
Reuter, who was waiting (Varley used Miss Clara's hand as a kind of
key), and I sent one of the first messages to Odden. I thought a
message addressed to him would not frighten you, and that he would
enjoy a message through papa's cable. I hope he did. They were all
very merry, but I had been so lowered by pain that I could not enjoy
myself in spite of the success."
V
Of the 1869 cruise in the _Great Eastern_ I give what I am able; only
sorry it is no more, for the sake of the ship itself, already almost a
legend even to the generation that saw it launched.
"_June 17, 1869._--Here are the names of our staff, in whom I expect
you to be interested, as future _Great Eastern_ stories may be full of
them; Theophilus Smith, a man of Latimer Clark's; Leslie C. Hill, my
prizeman at University College; Lord Sackville Cecil; King, one of the
Thomsonian Kings; Laws, goes for Willoughby Smith, who will also be on
board; Varley, Clark, and Sir James Anderson, make up the sum of all
you know anything of. A Captain Halpin commands the big ship. There
are four smaller vessels. The _Wm. Cory_, which laid the Norderney
cable, has already gone to St. Pierre to lay the shore-ends. The
_Hawk_ and _Chiltern_ have gone to Brest to lay shore-ends. The _Hawk_
and _Scanderia_ go with us across the Atlantic, and we shall at St.
Pierre be transhipped into one or the other.
"_June 18, somewhere in London._--The shore-end is laid, as you may
have seen, and we are all under pressing orders to march, so we start
from London to-night at 5.10.
"_June 20, off Ushant._--I am getting quite fond of the big ship.
Yesterday morning in the quiet sunlight she turned so slowly and
lazily in the great harbour at Portland, and by and by slipped out
past the long pier with so little stir, that I could hardly believe we
were really off. No men drunk, no women crying, no singing or
swearing, no confusion or bustle on deck--nobody apparently aware that
they had anything to do. The look of the thing was that the ship had
been spoken to civilly, and had kindly undertaken to do everything
that was necessary without any further interference. I have a nice
cabin, with plenty of room for my legs in my berth, and have slept two
nights like a top. Then we have the ladies' cabin set apart as an
engineer's office, and I think this decidedly the nicest place in the
ship: 35 ft. × 20 ft. broad--four tables, three great mirrors, plenty
of air, and no heat from the funnels, which spoil the great
dining-room. I saw a whole library of books on the walls when here
last, and this made me less anxious to provide light literature; but
alas, to-day I find that they are every one Bibles or Prayer-books.
Now one cannot read many hundred Bibles.... As for the motion of the
ship, it is not very much, but 'twill suffice. Thomson shook hands and
wished me well. I _do_ like Thomson.... Tell Austin that the _Great
Eastern_ has six masts and four funnels. When I get back I will make a
little model of her for all the chicks, and pay out cotton reels....
Here we are at 4.20 at Brest. We leave probably to-morrow morning.
"_July 12, Great Eastern._--Here as I write we run our last course for
the buoy at the St. Pierre shore-end. It blows and lightens, and our
good ship rolls, and buoys are hard to find; but we must soon now
finish our work, and then this letter will start for home....
Yesterday we were mournfully groping our way through the wet grey fog,
not at all sure where we were, with one consort lost and the other
faintly answering the roar of our great whistle through the mist. As
to the ship which was to meet us, and pioneer us up the deep channel,
we did not know if we should come within twenty miles of her; when
suddenly up went the fog, out came the sun, and there, straight
ahead, was the _Wm. Cory_, our pioneer, and a little dancing boat, the
_Gulnare_, sending signals of welcome with many-coloured flags. Since
then we have been steaming in a grand procession; but now at 2 A.M.
the fog has fallen, and the great roaring whistle calls up the distant
answering notes all around us. Shall we or shall we not find the buoy?
"_July 13._--All yesterday we lay in the damp dripping fog, with
whistles all round and guns firing so that we might not bump up
against one another. This little delay has let us get our reports into
tolerable order. We are now, at seven o'clock, getting the cable end
again, with the main cable buoy close to us."
_A telegram of July 20._--"I have received your four welcome letters.
The Americans are charming people."
VI
And here, to make an end, are a few random bits about the cruise to
Pernambuco:--
"_Plymouth, June 21, 1873._--I have been down to the seashore and
smelt the salt sea, and like it; and I have seen the _Hooper_ pointing
her great bow seaward, while light smoke rises from her funnels,
telling that the fires are being lighted; and sorry as I am to be
without you, something inside me answers to the call to be off and
doing.
"_Lalla Rookh, Plymouth, June 22._--We have been a little cruise in
the yacht over to the Eddystone lighthouse, and my sea-legs seem very
well on. Strange how alike all these starts are--first on shore,
steaming hot days with a smell of bone-dust and tar and salt water;
then the little puffing, panting steam-launch, that bustles out across
a port with green woody sides, little yachts sliding about, men-of-war
training-ships, and then a great big black hulk of a thing with a mass
of smaller vessels sticking to it like parasites; and that is one's
home being coaled. Then comes the champagne lunch, where every one
says all that is polite to every one else, and then the uncertainty
when to start. So far as we know _now_, we are to start to-morrow
morning at daybreak; letters that come later are to be sent to
Pernambuco by first mail.... My father has sent me the heartiest sort
of Jack Tar's cheer.
"_SS. Hooper, off Funchal, June 29._--Here we are, off Madeira at
seven o'clock in the morning. Thomson has been sounding with his
special toy ever since half-past three (1087 fathoms of water). I have
been watching the day break, and long jagged islands start into being
out of the dull night. We are still some miles from land; but the sea
is calmer than Loch Eil often was, and the big _Hooper_ rests very
contentedly after a pleasant voyage and favourable breezes. I have not
been able to do any real work except the testing [of the cable], for,
though not sea-sick, I get a little giddy when I try to think on
board.... The ducks have just had their daily souse and are quacking
and gabbling in a mighty way outside the door of the captain's deck
cabin, where I write. The cocks are crowing, and new-laid eggs are
said to be found in the coops. Four mild oxen have been untethered and
allowed to walk along the broad iron decks--a whole drove of sheep
seem quite content while licking big lumps of bay salt. Two
exceedingly impertinent goats lead the cook a perfect life of misery.
They steal round the galley and _will_ nibble the carrots or turnips
if his back is turned for one minute; and then he throws something at
them and misses them; and they scuttle off laughing impudently, and
flick one ear at him from a safe distance. This is the most impudent
gesture I ever saw. Winking is nothing to it. The ear normally hangs
down behind; the goat turns sideways to her enemy--by a little knowing
cock of the head flicks one ear over one eye, and squints from behind
it, for half a minute--tosses her head back, skips a pace or two
further off, and repeats the manoeuvre. The cook is very fat, and
cannot run after that goat much.
"_Pernambuco, Aug. 1._--We landed here yesterday, all well and cable
sound, after a good passage.... I am on familiar terms with
cocoa-nuts, mangoes, and bread-fruit trees, but I think I like the
negresses best of anything I have seen. In turbans and loose sea-green
robes, with beautiful black-brown complexions and a stately carriage,
they really are a satisfaction to my eye. The weather has been windy
and rainy; the _Hooper_ has to lie about a mile from the town, in an
open roadstead, with the whole swell of the Atlantic driving straight
on shore. The little steam-launch gives all who go in her a good
ducking, as she bobs about on the big rollers; and my old gymnastic
practice stands me in good stead on boarding and leaving her. We
clamber down a rope-ladder hanging from the high stern, and then,
taking a rope in one hand, swing into the launch at the moment when
she can contrive to steam up under us--bobbing about like an apple
thrown into a tub all the while. The President of the province and his
suite tried to come off to a State luncheon on board on Sunday; but
the launch, being rather heavily laden, behaved worse than usual, and
some green seas stove in the President's hat and made him wetter than
he had probably ever been in his life; so after one or two rollers, he
turned back; and indeed he was wise to do so, for I don't see how he
could have got on board.... Being fully convinced that the world will
not continue to go round unless I pay it personal attention, I must
run away to my work."
CHAPTER VI
1869-1885
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,[26] 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,[27] 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 inter-domestic
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 puppet-show 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 play-hour,
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. 15th, 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. 17th._--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 any one gets discomfited, he laughs a sort
of little silver-whistle giggle, which is trying to the unhappy
blunderer."
"_May 9th._--Frewen is deep in parachutes. I beg him not to drop from
the top landing in one of his own making."
"_June 6th, 1876._--Frewen's crank axle is a failure just at
present--but he bears up."
"_June 14th._--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 18th._--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 27th._--I do not see what I could do without Austin. He talks
so pleasantly, and is so truly good all through."
"_July 7th._--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. 18th, 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. 19th._--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
at 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 grey 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. "Glacometti'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 Barren, and from Enfield of the "Speaker." The
theatre was one of Edward Barren'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 arm-chair, 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 had
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 those infinitesimal improvements which are so much
in art and for the artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the
professional costumier, with unforgettable 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[28] 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." 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 vocalisation"; 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
Scottish 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 those 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 buckramed 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 make 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 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
pickthank; 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 humankind 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, 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 shone 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 without 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
sick-nurse 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. Émile 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 proposal que la séance fût
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 trouvait 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 coeur 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, au
quel 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, quoi qu'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 resserra
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 plus de relief à sa personne. J'emportai des quelques
heures que je passai à côté de lui dans ce charmant paysage un
souvenir ému.
J'étais allé en Angleterre en 1882 sans pouvoir gagner Édimbourg. 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 définitivement 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 élargi, 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Robert Lawson Tait (1845-1899).--ED.
[27] William Young Sellar (1825-1890).--ED.
[28] Not reprinted in this edition.--ED.
CHAPTER VII
1875-1885.
Mrs. Jenkin's illness--Captain Jenkin--The golden wedding--Death of
Uncle John--Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin--Illness and death of the
Captain--Death of Mrs. Jenkin--Effect on Fleeming--Telpherage--The
end.
And now I must resume my narrative for that melancholy business that
concludes all human histories. In January of the year 1875, while
Fleeming's sky was still unclouded, he was reading Smiles. "I read my
engineers' lives steadily," he writes, "but find biographies depressing.
I suspect one reason to be that misfortunes and trials can be
graphically described, but happiness and the causes of happiness either
cannot be or are not. A grand new branch of literature opens to my view:
a drama in which people begin in a poor way and end, after getting
gradually happier, in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The common novel is not
the thing at all. It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act
to close on a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily
growing all the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where
things get blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not
grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by a
little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new idea
was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned notion of art.
Hold a mirror up, indeed! Let's paint a picture of how things ought to
be, and hold that up to nature, and perhaps the poor old woman may
repent and mend her ways." The "grand idea" might be possible in art;
not even the ingenuity of nature could so round in the actual life of
any man. And yet it might almost seem to fancy that she had read the
letter and taken the hint; for to Fleeming the cruelties of fate were
strangely blended with tenderness, and when death came, it came harshly
to others, to him not unkindly.
In the autumn of that same year 1875, Fleeming's father and mother were
walking in the garden of their house at Merchiston, when the latter fell
to the ground. It was thought at the time to be a stumble; it was in all
likelihood a premonitory stroke of palsy. From that day there fell upon
her an abiding panic fear; that glib, superficial part of us that speaks
and reasons could allege no cause, science itself could find no mark of
danger, a son's solicitude was laid at rest; but the eyes of the body
saw the approach of a blow, and the consciousness of the body trembled
at its coming. It came in a moment; the brilliant, spirited old lady
leapt from her bed, raving. For about six months this stage of her
disease continued with many painful and many pathetic circumstances; her
husband, who tended her, her son, who was unwearied in his visits,
looked for no change in her condition but the change that comes to all.
"Poor mother," I find Fleeming writing, "I cannot get the tones of her
voice out of my head.... I may have to bear this pain for a long time;
and so I am bearing it and sparing myself whatever pain seems useless.
Mercifully I do sleep, I am so weary that I must sleep." And again
later: "I could do very well if my mind did not revert to my poor
mother's state whenever I stop attending to matters immediately before
me." And the next day: "I can never feel a moment's pleasure without
having my mother's suffering recalled by the very feeling of happiness.
A pretty young face recalls hers by contrast--a careworn face recalls it
by association. I tell you, for I can speak to no one else; but do not
suppose that I wilfully let my mind dwell on sorrow."
In the summer of the next year the frenzy left her; it left her stone
deaf and almost entirely aphasic, but with some remains of her old sense
and courage. Stoutly she set to work with dictionaries, to recover her
lost tongues; and had already made notable progress when a third stroke
scattered her acquisitions. Thenceforth, for nearly ten years, stroke
followed upon stroke, each still further jumbling the threads of her
intelligence, but by degrees so gradual and with such partiality of loss
and of survival, that her precise state was always and to the end a
matter of dispute. She still remembered her friends; she still loved to
learn news of them upon the slate; she still read and marked the list of
the subscription library; she still took an interest in the choice of a
play for the theatricals, and could remember and find parallel passages;
but alongside of these surviving powers, were lapses as remarkable, she
misbehaved like a child, and a servant had to sit with her at table. To
see her so sitting, speaking with the tones of a deaf-mute not always to
the purpose, and to remember what she had been, was a moving appeal to
all who knew her. Such was the pathos of these two old people in their
affliction, that even the reserve of cities was melted and the
neighbours vied in sympathy and kindness. Where so many were more than
usually helpful, it is hard to draw distinctions; but I am directed and
I delight to mention in particular the good Dr. Joseph Bell, Mr. Thomas
and Mr. Archibald Constable, with both their wives, the Rev. Mr.
Belcombe (of whose good heart and taste I do not hear for the first
time--the news had come to me by way of the Infirmary) and their
next-door neighbour, unwearied in service, Miss Hannah Mayne. Nor should
I omit to mention that John Ruffini continued to write to Mrs. Jenkin
till his own death, and the clever lady known to the world as Vernon Lee
until the end: a touching, a becoming attention to what was only the
wreck and survival of their brilliant friend.
But he to whom this affliction brought the greatest change was the
Captain himself. What was bitter in his lot he bore with unshaken
courage; only once, in these ten years of trial, has Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin
seen him weep; for the rest of the time his wife--his commanding officer,
now become his trying child--was served not with patience alone, but with
a lovely happiness of temper. He had belonged all his life to the
ancient, formal, speech-making, compliment-presenting school of courtesy;
the dictates of this code partook in his eyes of the nature of a duty;
and he must now be courteous for two. Partly from a happy illusion,
partly in a tender fraud, he kept his wife before the world as a still
active partner. When he paid a call, he would have her write "with love"
upon a card; or if that (at the moment) was too much, he would go armed
with a bouquet and present it in her name. He even wrote letters for her
to copy and sign: an innocent substitution, which may have caused
surprise to Ruffini or to Vernon Lee, if they ever received, in the hand
of Mrs. Jenkin, the very obvious reflections of her husband. He had
always adored this wife whom he now tended and sought to represent in
correspondence: it was now, if not before, her turn to repay the
compliment; mind enough was left her to perceive his unwearied kindness;
and as her moral qualities seemed to survive quite unimpaired, a childish
love and gratitude were his reward. She would interrupt a conversation to
cross the room and kiss him. If she grew excited (as she did too often)
it was his habit to come behind her chair and pat her shoulder; and then
she would turn round, and clasp his hand in hers, and look from him to
her visitor with a face of pride and love; and it was at such moments
only that the light of humanity revived in her eyes. It was hard for any
stranger, it was impossible for any that loved them, to behold these mute
scenes, to recall the past, and not to weep. But to the Captain, I think
it was all happiness. After these so long years he had found his wife
again; perhaps kinder than ever before; perhaps now on a more equal
footing; certainly, to his eyes, still beautiful. And the call made on
his intelligence had not been made in vain. The merchants of Aux Cayes,
who had seen him tried in some "counter-revolution" in 1845, wrote to the
consul of his "able and decided measures," "his cool, steady judgment and
discernment," with admiration; and of himself, as "a credit and an
ornament to H.M. Naval Service." It is plain he must have sunk in all his
powers, during the years when he was only a figure, and often a dumb
figure, in his wife's drawing-room; but with this new term of service he
brightened visibly. He showed tact and even invention in managing his
wife, guiding or restraining her by the touch, holding family worship so
arranged that she could follow and take part in it. He took (to the
world's surprise) to reading--voyages, biographies, Blair's Sermons, even
(for her letters' sake) a work of Vernon Lee's, which proved, however,
more than he was quite prepared for. He shone more, in his remarkable
way, in society; and twice he had a little holiday to Glenmorven, where,
as may be fancied, he was the delight of the Highlanders. One of his last
pleasures was to arrange his dining-room. Many and many a room (in their
wandering and thriftless existence) had he seen his wife furnish "with
exquisite taste" and perhaps with "considerable luxury": now it was his
turn to be the decorator. On the wall he had an engraving of Lord
Rodney's action, showing the _Prothée_, his father's ship, if the reader
recollects; on either side of this, on brackets, his father's sword, and
his father's telescope, a gift from Admiral Buckner, who had used it
himself during the engagement; higher yet, the head of his grandson's
first stag, portraits of his son and his son's wife, and a couple of old
Windsor jugs from Mrs. Buckner's. But his simple trophy was not yet
complete; a device had to be worked and framed and hung below the
engraving; and for this he applied to his daughter-in-law: "I want you to
work me something, Annie. An anchor at each side--an anchor--stands for
an old sailor, you know--stands for hope, you know--an anchor at each
side, and in the middle THANKFUL." It is not easy, on any system of
punctuation, to represent the Captain's speech. Yet I hope there may
shine out of these facts, even as there shone through his own troubled
utterance, some of the charm of that delightful spirit.
In 1881 the time of the golden wedding came round for that sad and
pretty household. It fell on a Good Friday, and its celebration can
scarcely be recalled without both smiles and tears. The drawing-room was
filled with presents and beautiful bouquets; these, to Fleeming and his
family, the golden bride and bridegroom displayed with unspeakable
pride, she so painfully excited that the guests feared every moment to
see her stricken afresh, he guiding and moderating her with his
customary tact and understanding, and doing the honours of the day with
more than his usual delight. Thence they were brought to the
dining-room, where the Captain's idea of a feast awaited them: tea and
champagne, fruit and toast and childish little luxuries, set forth
pell-mell and pressed at random on the guests. And here he must make a
speech for himself and his wife, praising their destiny, their marriage,
their son, their daughter-in-law, their grandchildren, their manifold
causes of gratitude: surely the most innocent speech, the old, sharp
contemner of his innocence now watching him with eyes of admiration.
Then it was time for the guests to depart; and they went away, bathed,
even to the youngest child, in tears of inseparable sorrow and gladness,
and leaving the golden bride and bridegroom to their own society and
that of the hired nurse.
It was a great thing for Fleeming to make, even thus late, the
acquaintance of his father; but the harrowing pathos of such scenes
consumed him. In a life of tense intellectual effort a certain
smoothness of emotional tenor were to be desired; or we burn the candle
at both ends. Dr. Bell perceived the evil that was being done; he
pressed Mrs. Jenkin to restrain her husband from too frequent visits;
but here was one of those clear-cut, indubitable duties for which
Fleeming lived, and he could not pardon even the suggestion of neglect.
And now, after death had so long visibly but still innocuously hovered
above the family, it began at last to strike, and its blows fell thick
and heavy. The first to go was uncle John Jenkin, taken at last from his
Mexican dwelling and the lost tribes of Israel; and nothing in this
remarkable old gentleman's life became him like the leaving of it. His
sterling, jovial acquiescence in man's destiny was a delight to
Fleeming. "My visit to Stowting has been a very strange but not at all a
painful one," he wrote. "In case you ever wish to make a person die as
he ought to die in a novel," he said to me, "I must tell you all about
my old uncle." He was to see a nearer instance before long; for this
family of Jenkin, if they were not very aptly fitted to live, had the
art of manly dying. Uncle John was but an outsider after all; he had
dropped out of hail of his nephew's way of life and station in society,
and was more like some shrewd, old, humble friend who should have kept a
lodge; yet he led the procession of becoming deaths, and began in the
mind of Fleeming that train of tender and grateful thought which was
like a preparation for his own. Already I find him writing in the plural
of "these impending deaths"; already I find him in quest of consolation.
"There is little pain in store for these wayfarers," he wrote, "and we
have hope--more than hope, trust."
On May 19, 1884, Mr. Austin was taken. He was seventy-eight years of
age, suffered sharply with all his old firmness, and died happy in the
knowledge that he had left his wife well cared for. This had always been
a bosom concern; for the Barrons were long-lived and he believed that
she would long survive him. But their union had been so full and quiet
that Mrs. Austin languished under the separation. In their last years
they would sit all evening in their own drawing-room hand in hand: two
old people who, for all their fundamental differences, had yet grown
together and become all the world in each other's eyes and hearts; and
it was felt to be a kind release when, eight months after, on January
14, 1885, Eliza Barron followed Alfred Austin. "I wish I could save you
from all pain," wrote Fleeming six days later to his sorrowing wife, "I
would if I could--but my way is not God's way; and of this be
assured,--God's way is best."
In the end of the same month Captain Jenkin caught cold and was confined
to bed. He was so unchanged in spirit that at first there seemed no
ground of fear; but his great age began to tell, and presently it was
plain he had a summons. The charm of his sailor's cheerfulness and
ancient courtesy, as he lay dying, is not to be described. There he lay,
singing his old sea-songs; watching the poultry from the window with a
child's delight; scribbling on the slate little messages to his wife,
who lay bedridden in another room; glad to have Psalms read aloud to
him, if they were of a pious strain--checking, with an "I don't think we
need read that, my dear," any that were gloomy or bloody. Fleeming's
wife coming to the house and asking one of the nurses for news of Mrs.
Jenkin, "Madam, I do not know," said the nurse; "for I am really so
carried away by the Captain that I can think of nothing else." One of
the last messages scribbled to his wife, and sent her with a glass of
the champagne that had been ordered for himself, ran, in his most
finished vein of childish madrigal: "The Captain bows to you, my love,
across the table." When the end was near, and it was thought best that
Fleeming should no longer go home, but sleep at Merchiston, he broke his
news to the Captain with some trepidation, knowing that it carried
sentence of death. "Charming, charming--charming arrangement," was the
Captain's only commentary. It was the proper thing for a dying man, of
Captain Jenkin's school of manners, to make some expression of his
spiritual state; nor did he neglect the observance. With his usual
abruptness, "Fleeming," said he, "I suppose you and I feel about all
this as two Christian gentlemen should." A last pleasure was secured for
him. He had been waiting with painful interest for news of Gordon and
Khartoum; and by great good fortune a false report reached him that the
city was relieved, and the men of Sussex (his old neighbours) had been
the first to enter. He sat up in bed and gave three cheers for the
Sussex Regiment. The subsequent correction, if it came in time, was
prudently withheld from the dying man. An hour before midnight on the
5th of February, he passed away: aged eighty-four.
Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin; and she survived him no
more than nine-and-forty hours. On the day before her death she received
a letter from her old friend Miss Bell of Manchester, knew the hand,
kissed the envelope and laid it on her heart; so that she too died upon
a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight, on the 8th of February, she
fell asleep: it is supposed in her seventy-eighth year.
Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of this
family were taken away; but taken with such features of opportunity in
time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a
kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was profound. His pious
optimism increased and became touched with something mystic and filial.
"The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible," he had
written in the beginning of his mother's illness: he thought so no more,
when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting. He had
always loved life; in the brief time that now remained to him he seemed
to be half in love with death. "Grief is no duty," he wrote to Miss
Bell; "it was all too beautiful for grief," he said to me, but the
emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths; his
wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must demolish the
Captain's trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely
the same man.
These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his
vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by hope.
The singular invention to which he gave the name of "Telpherage" had of
late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength, and overheated his
imagination. The words in which he first mentioned his discovery to
me--"I am simply Alnaschar"--were not only descriptive of his state of
mind, they were in a sense prophetic; since, whatever fortune may await
his idea in the future, it was not his to see it bring forth fruit.
Alnaschar he was indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a
world filled with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and
family but all his friends enriched. It was his pleasure, when the
company was floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at
least, never knew that he was a possible rich man until the grave had
closed over his stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming chafed among
material and business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded; and
he, like his father and his mother, may be said to have died upon a
pleasure. But the strain told, and he knew that it was telling. "I am
becoming a fossil," he had written five years before, as a kind of plea
for a holiday visit to his beloved Italy. "Take care! If I am Mr.
Fossil, you will be Mrs. Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all
the boys will be little fossils, and then we shall be a collection."
There was no fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no
repose; he was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first;
weariness, to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not
quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate which had
overtaken his mother; others shared the fear. In the changed life now
made for his family, the elders dead, the sons going from home upon
their education, even their tried domestic (Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving
the house after twenty-two years of service, it was not unnatural that
he should return to dreams of Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he
told me) on "a real honeymoon tour." He had not been alone with his
wife "to speak of," he added, since the birth of his children. But now
he was to enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days,
that she was his "Heaven on earth." Now he was to revisit Italy, and see
all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he admired so
warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his strenuous
activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to restore his
former lightness of foot; and it was a renovated youth that was to set
forth upon this re-enacted honeymoon.
The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it seemed
to go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was reading aloud to
him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to wander in his mind. It
is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure grasp upon the things of life;
and he was still unconscious when he passed away, June the 12th, 1885,
in the fifty-third year of his age. He passed; but something in his
gallant vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still
impresses. Not from one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale
of how the imagination refuses to accept our loss, and instinctively
looks for his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image
like things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved too, die and are
progressively forgotten: two years have passed since Fleeming was laid
to rest beside his father, his mother, and his uncle John; and the
thought and the look of our friend still haunts us.
END OF VOL. IX
PRINTED BY
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE,
LONDON, E.C.
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