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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, by Robert Louis
Stevenson
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: September 14, 2012 [eBook #698]
[This file was first posted on October 25, 1996]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1901 Charles Scribner’s Sons
edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<h1>MEMOIR<br />
<span class="GutSmall">OF</span><br />
FLEEMING JENKIN</h1>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
/>
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">NEW
YORK</span><br />
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS<br />
1901</p>
<h2>PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">On</span> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">R. L S.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">Saranac</span>, <i>Oct.</i>, 1887.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">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.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>in capite</i> 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.</p>
<p>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
that the family was ruined.</p>
<p>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 <i>Minotaur</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Minotaur</i>
had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting and the line of the
Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third brother,
Charles.</p>
<p>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 <i>Prothée</i>,
64, that the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days
of Rodney’s war, when the <i>Prothée</i>, 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 <i>Prothée</i>, I find a code of signals
graphically represented, for all the world as it would have been
done by his grandson.</p>
<p>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
practice 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.</p>
<p>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<i>l.</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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; everyday 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the
<i>Conqueror</i>, 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.’</p>
<p>The <i>Conqueror</i> 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 flagship of Sir Pulteney
Malcolm. Thus it befel 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 <i>Conqueror</i>
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 <i>Conqueror</i> 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 <i>Conqueror</i> 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.’</p>
<p>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
<i>Larne</i>, 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
<i>Larne</i>. 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
Scotch 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
<i>Cambrian</i>, kept the Greeks in order afloat,’ writes
my author, ‘and King Tom ashore.’</p>
<p>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 <i>Griffon</i>, 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 <i>Romney</i> lying in the inner harbour of
Havannah. The <i>Romney</i> 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
eye-sore 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
<i>Romney</i> 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 <i>Times</i> (March 13,
1876).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 Scotch; 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>prima donna</i> 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.</p>
<p>How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl
and the young midshipman, is not very I 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 the father, an extreme example of its humble
virtues. On the other side, the wild, cruel, proud, and
somewhat blackguard stock of the Scotch Campbell-Jacksons, had
put forth, in the person of the mother all its force and
courage.</p>
<p>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, <i>quasi</i> amateur’s)
‘engineering? Oh, what presumption!—either of
you or <i>my</i>self!’ 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER II. 1833–1851.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">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.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin</span>
(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.</p>
<p>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 life-long war in
his members had begun thus early by a victory for what was
best.</p>
<p>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 euxmêmes.” . .
. 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.</p>
<p>His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh.
Thence he went to the Edinburgh Academy, where he was the
classmate of Tait and Clerk Maxwell, bore away many prizes, and
was once unjustly flogged by Rector Williams. He used to
insist that all his bad schoolfellows 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p style="text-align: right">‘February 23,
1848.</p>
<p>‘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. . . .</p>
<p>[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
“<i>Marseillaise</i>,” 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.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>plong</i> went one shot—every face went
pale—<i>r-r-r-r-r</i> 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.]</p>
<p>‘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 <i>détour</i>, I
found a passage and ran home, and in our street joined papa.</p>
<p>‘. . . I’ll tell you to-morrow the other facts
gathered from newspapers and papa. . . . Tonight 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Monday, 24.</p>
<p>‘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. Everyone was very grave now; the <i>externes</i>
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.</p>
<p>‘About 12 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.</p>
<p>‘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 muskets 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. . . . .</p>
<p>‘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 gallopped 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.</p>
<p>‘Went out again up the Boulevards. The house of
the Minister of Foreign Affairs was filled with people and
“<i>Hôtel du Peuple</i>” 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 were 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! <i>Vive la
Réforme</i>!” 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.</p>
<p>‘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 cartridges 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 <i>Goddam</i> in the streets; but
to-day, in civil war, when they might have put a bullet through
our heads, I never was insulted once.</p>
<p>‘At present we have a provisional Government, consisting
of Odion [<i>sic</i>] Barrot, Lamartine, Marast, and some others;
among them a common workman, but very intelligent. This is
a triumph of liberty—rather!</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Feb. 25.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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. . . . .</p>
<p>‘I have been out all day again to-day, and precious
tired I am. The Republican party seem the strongest, and
are going about with red ribbons in their button-holes. . . .
.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>tableau vivant</i>, 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">(On Envelope.)</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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
‘<i>Marseillaise</i>’ at the Français, the
tricolour 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 ‘<i>Mourir
pour la Patrie</i>.’ 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.</p>
<p>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</p>
<blockquote><p>France standing on the top of golden hours<br />
And human nature seeming born again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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,</p>
<blockquote><p>Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,<br />
But to be young was very heaven.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like
Wordsworth) they should have so specially disliked the
consequence.</p>
<p>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 January 23 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.’</p>
<p>‘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 [<i>sic</i>]
it.’ He found it ‘not a bit of fun sitting
boxed up in the house four days almost. . . I was the only
<i>gentleman</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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
<i>Vengeance</i>, 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. <i>Accustomed as we are</i> 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
their second revolution.</p>
<p>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 <i>Vengeance</i>, 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, ‘<i>Console Inglese</i>.’ 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 cauldron 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
<i>Vengeance</i>. The Jenkins also had their refugees, the
family of an <i>employé</i> 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.</p>
<p>Lord Hardwicke intervened between the rebels and La Marmora;
and there followed a troubled armistice, filled with the voice of
panic. Now the <i>Vengeance</i> 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.</p>
<p>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
<i>protégé</i>, 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 electromagnetism; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER III. 1851–1858.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">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.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> 1851, the year of Aunt
Anna’s death, the family left Genoa and came to Manchester,
where Fleeming was entered in Fairbairn’s works as an
apprentice. From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue
Mediterranean, the humming lanes and the bright theatres of
Genoa, he fell—and he was sharply conscious of the
fall—to the dim skies and the foul ways of
Manchester. England he found on his return ‘a horrid
place,’ and there is no doubt the family found it a dear
one. The story of the Jenkin finances is not easy to
follow. The family, I am told, did not practice frugality,
only lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who was
always complaining of ‘those dreadful bills,’ was
‘always a good deal dressed.’ But at this time
of the return to England, things must have gone further. A
holiday tour of a fortnight, Fleeming feared would be beyond what
he could afford, and he only projected it ‘to have a castle
in the air.’ And there were actual pinches.
Fresh from a warmer sun, he was obliged to go without a
greatcoat, and learned on railway journeys to supply the place of
one with wrappings of old newspaper.</p>
<p>From half-past eight till six, he must ‘file and chip
vigorously in a moleskin suit and infernally dirty.’
The work was not new to him, for he had already passed some time
in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work was without
interest. Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know
and do also. ‘I never learned anything,’ he
wrote, ‘not even standing on my head, but I found a use for
it.’ In the spare hours of his first telegraph
voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he meant
‘to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the
ship and how to handle her on any occasion’; and once when
he was shown a young lady’s holiday collection of seaweeds,
he must cry out, ‘It showed me my eyes had been
idle.’ Nor was his the case of the mere literary
smatterer, content if he but learn the names of things. In
him, to do and to do well, was even a dearer ambition than to
know. Anything done well, any craft, despatch, or finish,
delighted and inspired him. I remember him with a twopenny
Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly fitted that, when one
was driven home, the others started from their places; the whole
spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box; that plain
piece of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of
perfection as the happiest drawing or the finest bronze; and he
who could not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it
in the others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo’s
engineering and anatomical drawings a perpetual feast; and of the
former he spoke even with emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed
Fleeming more than the attempt to separate the fine arts from the
arts of handicraft; any definition or theory that failed to bring
these two together, according to him, had missed the point; and
the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing things well
done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last to
deny that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of
all. And on the other hand, a nail ill-driven, a joint
ill-fitted, a tracing clumsily done, anything to which a man had
set his hand and not set it aptly, moved him to shame and
anger. With such a character, he would feel but little
drudgery at Fairbairn’s. There would be something
daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark
of skill to be attained; he would chip and file, as he had
practiced scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but resolute
to learn.</p>
<p>And there was another spring of delight. For he was now
moving daily among those strange creations of man’s brain,
to some so abhorrent, to him of an interest so inexhaustible: in
which iron, water, and fire are made to serve as slaves, now with
a tread more powerful than an elephant’s, and now with a
touch more precise and dainty than a pianist’s. The
taste for machinery was one that I could never share with him,
and he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness. Once when
I had proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect,
he looked at me askance. ‘And the best of the
joke,’ said he, ‘is that he thinks himself quite a
poet.’ For to him the struggle of the engineer
against brute forces and with inert allies, was nobly
poetic. Habit never dulled in him the sense of the
greatness of the aims and obstacles of his profession.
Habit only sharpened his inventor’s gusto in contrivance,
in triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which
wires are taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the
slender ship to brave and to outstrip the tempest. To the
ignorant the great results alone are admirable; to the knowing,
and to Fleeming in particular, rather the infinite device and
sleight of hand that made them possible.</p>
<p>A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as
Fairbairn’s, a pupil would never be popular unless he drank
with the workmen and imitated them in speech and manner.
Fleeming, who would do none of these things, they accepted as a
friend and companion; and this was the subject of remark in
Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till to-day. He
thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be brought
into a close relation with the working classes; and for the
skilled artisan he had a great esteem, liking his company, his
virtues, and his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the
classes too well to regard them, like a platform speaker, in a
lump. He drew, on the other hand, broad distinctions; and
it was his profound sense of the difference between one working
man and another that led him to devote so much time, in later
days, to the furtherance of technical education. In 1852 he
had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in the
excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom)
both would seem to have behaved. Beginning with a fair show
of justice on either side, the masters stultified their cause by
obstinate impolicy, and the men disgraced their order by acts of
outrage. ‘On Wednesday last,’ writes Fleeming,
‘about three thousand banded round Fairbairn’s door
at 6 o’clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and
girls, the lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders
came that no one was to leave the works; but the men inside
(Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious hungry and thought
they would venture. Two of my companions and myself went
out with the very first, and had the full benefit of every
possible groan and bad language.’ But the police
cleared a lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to
escape unhurt, and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked
with clogs; so that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing,
that fine thrill of expectant valour with which he had sallied
forth into the mob. ‘I never before felt myself so
decidedly somebody, instead of nobody,’ he wrote.</p>
<p>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 <i>Agamemnon</i>
(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.</p>
<p>In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to
my readers—that of the Gaskells, Fleeming was a frequent
visitor. To Mrs. Gaskell, he would often bring his new
ideas, a process that many of his later friends will understand
and, in their own cases, remember. With the girls, he had
‘constant fierce wrangles,’ forcing them to reason
out their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I
hear from Miss Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could
throw all the ardour of his character into the smallest matters,
and to admire his unselfish devotion to his parents. Of one
of these wrangles, I have found a record most characteristic of
the man. Fleeming had been laying down his doctrine that
the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right ‘to
boast of your six men-servants to a burglar or to steal a knife
to prevent a murder’; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish
loyalty to what is current, had rejected the heresy with
indignation. From such passages-at-arms, many retire
mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the house
than he fell into delighted admiration of the spirit of his
adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself
‘what truth was sticking in their heads’; for even
the falsest form of words (in Fleeming’s life-long opinion)
reposed upon some truth, just as he could ‘not even allow
that people admire ugly things, they admire what is pretty in the
ugly thing.’ And before he sat down to write his
letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation.
‘I fancy the true idea,’ he wrote, ‘is that you
must never do yourself or anyone else a moral injury—make
any man a thief or a liar—for any end’; quite a
different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never
stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not
always out of key with his audience. One whom he met in the
same house announced that she would never again be happy.
‘What does that signify?’ cried Fleeming.
‘We are not here to be happy, but to be good.’
And the words (as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort
of motto during life.</p>
<p>From Fairbairn’s and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a
railway survey in Switzerland, and thence again to Mr.
Penn’s at Greenwich, where he was engaged as
draughtsman. There in 1856, we find him in ‘a
terribly busy state, finishing up engines for innumerable
gun-boats and steam frigates for the ensuing
campaign.’ From half-past eight in the morning till
nine or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among
uncongenial comrades, ‘saluted by chaff, generally low
personal and not witty,’ pelted with oranges and apples,
regaled with dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself with his
surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be as little like
himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by,
‘across a dirty green and through some half-built streets
of two-storied houses’; he had Carlyle and the poets,
engineering and mathematics, to study by himself in such spare
time as remained to him; and there were several ladies, young and
not so young, with whom he liked to correspond. But not all
of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who had
made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry
surroundings, unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the
mechanical. ‘Sunday,’ says he, ‘I
generally visit some friends in town and seem to swim in clearer
water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get
back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not
stand this life.’ It is a question in my mind, if he
could have long continued to stand it without loss.
‘We are not here to be happy, but to be good,’ quoth
the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for
happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life
besides when apart from circumstances, few men are agreeable to
their neighbours and still fewer to themselves; and it was at
this stage that Fleeming had arrived, later than common and even
worse provided. The letter from which I have quoted is the
last of his correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last
confidential letter to one of his own sex. ‘If you
consider it rightly,’ he wrote long after, ‘you will
find the want of correspondence no such strange want in
men’s friendships. There is, believe me, something
noble in the metal which does not rust though not burnished by
daily use.’ It is well said; but the last letter to
Frank Scott is scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the
writer has outgrown his old self, yet not made acquaintance with
the new. This letter from a busy youth of three and twenty,
breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and
shame, the expense of hope <i>in vacuo</i>, the lack of friends,
the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under which
youth stands groaning, a voluntary Atlas.</p>
<p>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 “<i>Donne
l’amore è scaltro pargoletto</i>”; and think
and talk about you; and listen to mamma’s projects
<i>de</i> Stowting. Everything turns to gold at her touch,
she’s a fairy and no mistake. We go on talking till I
have a picture in my head, and can hardly believe at the end that
the original is Stowting. Even you don’t know half
how good mamma is; in other things too, which I must not
mention. She teaches me how it is not necessary to be very
rich to do much good. I begin to understand that mamma
would find useful occupation and create beauty at the bottom of a
volcano. She has little weaknesses, but is a real
generous-hearted woman, which I suppose is the finest thing in
the world.’ Though neither mother nor son could be
called beautiful, they make a pretty picture; the ugly, generous,
ardent woman weaving rainbow illusions; the ugly, clear-sighted,
loving son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours of
pleasure, half-beguiled, half-amused, wholly admiring, as he
listens. But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures fade,
and Stowting is once more burthened with debt, and the noisy
companions and the long hours of drudgery once more approach, no
wonder if the dirty green seems all the dirtier or if Atlas must
resume his load.</p>
<p>But in healthy natures, this time of moral teething passes
quickly of itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh interests;
and already, in the letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of
hope: his friends in London, his love for his profession.
The last might have saved him; for he was ere long to pass into a
new sphere, where all his faculties were to be tried and
exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and
effort. But it was not left to engineering: another and
more influential aim was to be set before him. He must, in
any case, have fallen in love; in any case, his love would have
ruled his life; and the question of choice was, for the
descendant of two such families, a thing of paramount
importance. Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted
as he was, the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins
might have been led far astray. By one of those
partialities that fill men at once with gratitude and wonder, his
choosing was directed well. Or are we to say that by a
man’s choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he
deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may
discern: that a man but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his
help-mate; and he must in part deserve her, or the treasure is
but won for a moment to be lost. Fleeming chanced if you
will (and indeed all these opportunities are as ‘random as
blind man’s buff’) upon a wife who was worthy of him;
but he had the wit to know it, the courage to wait and labour for
his prize, and the tenderness and chivalry that are required to
keep such prizes precious. Upon this point he has himself
written well, as usual with fervent optimism, but as usual (in
his own phrase) with a truth sticking in his head.</p>
<p>‘Love,’ he wrote, ‘is not an intuition of
the person most suitable to us, most required by us; of the
person with whom life flowers and bears fruit. If this were
so, the chances of our meeting that person would be small indeed;
our intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would then
be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love works differently,
and in its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each
strongly desires to be loved, each opens to the other that heart
of ideal aspirations which they have often hid till then; each,
thus knowing the ideal of the other, tries to fulfil that ideal,
each partially succeeds. The greater the love, the greater
the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more durable, the
more beautiful the effect. Meanwhile the blindness of each
to the other’s defects enables the transformation to
proceed [unobserved,] so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it
ever is, and this I do not know) neither knows that any change
has occurred in the person whom they loved. Do not fear,
therefore. I do not tell you that your friend will not
change, but as I am sure that her choice cannot be that of a man
with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe and a
good one. Do not fear that anything you love will vanish,
he must love it too.’</p>
<p>Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a
letter from Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins. This was a
family certain to interest a thoughtful young man. Alfred,
the youngest and least known of the Austins, had been a beautiful
golden-haired child, petted and kept out of the way of both sport
and study by a partial mother. Bred an attorney, he had
(like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and was called
to the bar when past thirty. A Commission of Enquiry into
the state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of
proving his true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law
Inspector, first at Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had
to deal with the potato famine and the Irish immigration of the
‘forties, and finally in London, where he again
distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He was
then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her
Majesty’s Office of Works and Public Buildings; a position
which he filled with perfect competence, but with an extreme of
modesty; and on his retirement, in 1868, he was made a Companion
of the Bath. While apprentice to a Norwich attorney, Alfred
Austin was a frequent visitor in the house of Mr. Barron, a
rallying place in those days of intellectual society.
Edward Barron, the son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in
the Borough, was a man typical of the time. When he was a
child, he had once been patted on the head in his father’s
shop by no less a man than Samuel Johnson, as the Doctor went
round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale; and the child was
true to this early consecration. ‘A life of lettered
ease spent in provincial retirement,’ it is thus that the
biographer of that remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his
subject; and the phrase is equally descriptive of the life of
Edward Barron. The pair were close friends, ‘W. T.
and a pipe render everything agreeable,’ writes Barron in
his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had moved to London
and Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers, the
latter wrote: ‘To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you
please, that I miss him more than I regret him—that I
acquiesce in his retirement from Norwich, because I could ill
brook his observation of my increasing debility of
mind.’ This chosen companion of William Taylor must
himself have been no ordinary man; and he was the friend besides
of Borrow, whom I find him helping in his Latin. But he had
no desire for popular distinction, lived privately, married a
daughter of Dr. Enfield of Enfield’s <i>Speaker</i>, and
devoted his time to the education of his family, in a deliberate
and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits of stoicism, that
would surprise a modern. From these children we must single
out his youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under his care to
be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion
without outward sign after the manner of the Godwin school.
This was the more notable, as the girl really derived from the
Enfields; whose high-flown romantic temper, I wish I could find
space to illustrate. She was but seven years old, when
Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her; and the union
thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the husband
and wife differed, and they did so on momentous subjects, they
differed with perfect temper and content; and in the conduct of
life, and in depth and durability of love, they were at
one. Each full of high spirits, each practised something of
the same repression: no sharp word was uttered in their
house. The same point of honour ruled them, a guest was
sacred and stood within the pale from criticism. It was a
house, besides, of unusual intellectual tension. Mrs.
Austin remembered, in the early days of the marriage, the three
brothers, John, Charles, and Alfred, marching to and fro, each
with his hands behind his back, and ‘reasoning high’
till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would cheer their
speculations with as many as fifteen cups of tea. And
though, before the date of Fleeming’s visit, the brothers
were separated, Charles long ago retired from the world at
Brandeston, and John already near his end in the ‘rambling
old house’ at Weybridge, Alfred Austin and his wife were
still a centre of much intellectual society, and still, as indeed
they remained until the last, youthfully alert in mind.
There was but one child of the marriage, Anne, and she was
herself something new for the eyes of the young visitor; brought
up, as she had been, like her mother before her, to the standard
of a man’s acquirements. Only one art had she been
denied, she must not learn the violin—the thought was too
monstrous even for the Austins; and indeed it would seem as if
that tide of reform which we may date from the days of Mary
Wollstonecraft had in some degree even receded; for though Miss
Austin was suffered to learn Greek, the accomplishment was kept
secret like a piece of guilt. But whether this stealth was
caused by a backward movement in public thought since the time of
Edward Barron, or by the change from enlightened Norwich to
barbarian London, I have no means of judging.</p>
<p>When Fleeming presented his letter, he fell in love at first
sight with Mrs. Austin and the life, and atmosphere of the
house. There was in the society of the Austins, outward,
stoical conformers to the world, something gravely suggestive of
essential eccentricity, something unpretentiously breathing of
intellectual effort, that could not fail to hit the fancy of this
hot-brained boy. The unbroken enamel of courtesy, the
self-restraint, the dignified kindness of these married folk, had
besides a particular attraction for their visitor. He could
not but compare what he saw, with what he knew of his mother and
himself. Whatever virtues Fleeming possessed, he could
never count on being civil; whatever brave, true-hearted
qualities he was able to admire in Mrs. Jenkin, mildness of
demeanour was not one of them. And here he found per sons
who were the equals of his mother and himself in intellect and
width of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity
of disposition. Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he
always loved it. He went away from that house struck
through with admiration, and vowing to himself that his own
married life should be upon that pattern, his wife (whoever she
might be) like Eliza Barron, himself such another husband as
Alfred Austin. What is more strange, he not only brought
away, but left behind him, golden opinions. He must have
been—he was, I am told—a trying lad; but there shone
out of him such a light of innocent candour, enthusiasm,
intelligence, and appreciation, that to persons already some way
forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently the
perennial comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful.
By a pleasant coincidence, there was one person in the house whom
he did not appreciate and who did not appreciate him: Anne
Austin, his future wife. His boyish vanity ruffled her; his
appearance, never impressive, was then, by reason of obtrusive
boyishness, still less so; she found occasion to put him in the
wrong by correcting a false quantity; and when Mr. Austin, after
doing his visitor the almost unheard-of honour of accompanying
him to the door, announced ‘That was what young men were
like in my time’—she could only reply, looking on her
handsome father, ‘I thought they had been better
looking.’</p>
<p>This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it
seems it was some time before Fleeming began to know his mind;
and yet longer ere he ventured to show it. The corrected
quantity, to those who knew him well, will seem to have played
its part; he was the man always to reflect over a correction and
to admire the castigator. And fall in love he did; not
hurriedly but step by step, not blindly but with critical
discrimination; not in the fashion of Romeo, but before he was
done, with all Romeo’s ardour and more than Romeo’s
faith. The high favour to which he presently rose in the
esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife, might well give him
ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present and the
obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when
his aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted,
perhaps for the only time in his life, the pangs of
diffidence. There was indeed opening before him a wide door
of hope. He had changed into the service of Messrs. Liddell
& Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in the new
field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to face
with his life’s work. That impotent sense of his own
value, as of a ship aground, which makes one of the agonies of
youth, began to fall from him. New problems which he was
endowed to solve, vistas of new enquiry which he was fitted to
explore, opened before him continually. His gifts had found
their avenue and goal. And with this pleasure of effective
exercise, there must have sprung up at once the hope of what is
called by the world success. But from these low beginnings,
it was a far look upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved
one seems always more than problematical to any lover; the
consent of parents must be always more than doubtful to a young
man with a small salary and no capital except capacity and
hope. But Fleeming was not the lad to lose any good thing
for the lack of trial; and at length, in the autumn of 1857, this
boyish-sized, boyish-mannered, and superlatively ill-dressed
young engineer, entered the house of the Austins, with such
sinkings as we may fancy, and asked leave to pay his addresses to
the daughter. Mrs. Austin already loved him like a son, she
was but too glad to give him her consent; Mr. Austin reserved the
right to inquire into his character; from neither was there a
word about his prospects, by neither was his income
mentioned. ‘Are these people,’ he wrote, struck
with wonder at this dignified disinterestedness, ‘are these
people the same as other people?’ It was not till he
was armed with this permission, that Miss Austin even suspected
the nature of his hopes: so strong, in this unmannerly boy, was
the principle of true courtesy; so powerful, in this impetuous
nature, the springs of self-repression. And yet a boy he
was; a boy in heart and mind; and it was with a boy’s
chivalry and frankness that he won his wife. His conduct
was a model of honour, hardly of tact; to conceal love from the
loved one, to court her parents, to be silent and discreet till
these are won, and then without preparation to approach the
lady—these are not arts that I would recommend for
imitation. They lead to final refusal. Nothing saved
Fleeming from that fate, but one circumstance that cannot be
counted upon—the hearty favour of the mother, and one gift
that is inimitable and that never failed him throughout life, the
gift of a nature essentially noble and outspoken. A happy
and high-minded anger flashed through his despair: it won for him
his wife.</p>
<p>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 <i>Elba</i> on his first
telegraph cruise between Sardinia and Algiers: a busy and
delightful period of bounding ardour, incessant toil, growing
hope and fresh interests, with behind and through all, the image
of his beloved. A few extracts from his correspondence with
his betrothed will give the note of these truly joyous
years. ‘My profession gives me all the excitement and
interest I ever hope for, but the sorry jade is obviously jealous
of you.’—‘“Poor Fleeming,” in spite
of wet, cold and wind, clambering over moist, tarry slips,
wandering among pools of slush in waste places inhabited by
wandering locomotives, grows visibly stronger, has dismissed his
office cough and cured his toothache.’—‘The
whole of the paying out and lifting machinery must be designed
and ordered in two or three days, and I am half crazy with
work. I like it though: it’s like a good ball, the
excitement carries you through.’—‘I was running
to and from the ships and warehouse through fierce gusts of rain
and wind till near eleven, and you cannot think what a pleasure
it was to be blown about and think of you in your pretty
dress.’—‘I am at the works till ten and
sometimes till eleven. But I have a nice office to sit in,
with a fire to myself, and bright brass scientific instruments
all round me, and books to read, and experiments to make, and
enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity so
entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work.’
And for a last taste, ‘Yesterday I had some charming
electrical experiments. What shall I compare them
to—a new song? a Greek play?’</p>
<p>It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of
Professor, now Sir William, Thomson. To describe the part
played by these two in each other’s lives would lie out of
my way. They worked together on the Committee on Electrical
Standards; they served together at the laying down or the repair
of many deep-sea cables; and Sir William was regarded by
Fleeming, not only with the ‘worship’ (the word is
his own) due to great scientific gifts, but with an ardour of
personal friendship not frequently excelled. To their
association, Fleeming brought the valuable element of a practical
understanding; but he never thought or spoke of himself where Sir
William was in question; and I recall quite in his last days, a
singular instance of this modest loyalty to one whom he admired
and loved. He drew up a paper, in a quite personal
interest, of his own services; yet even here he must step out of
his way, he must add, where it had no claim to be added, his
opinion that, in their joint work, the contributions of Sir
William had been always greatly the most valuable. Again, I
shall not readily forget with what emotion he once told me an
incident of their associated travels. On one of the
mountain ledges of Madeira, Fleeming’s pony bolted between
Sir William. and the precipice above; by strange good fortune and
thanks to the steadiness of Sir William’s horse, no harm
was done; but for the moment, Fleeming saw his friend hurled into
the sea, and almost by his own act: it was a memory that haunted
him.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER IV. 1859–1868.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">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.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">On</span> 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
<i>Elba’s</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 school-boy. 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.</p>
<p>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, which will be
found in the Appendix, and to which I must refer the
reader. 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 & 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 these 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.’</p>
<p>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 ‘<i>Fecundity</i>, <i>Fertility</i>,
<i>Sterility</i>, <i>and Allied Topics</i>,’ 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.</p>
<p>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’; <a
name="citation113"></a><a href="#footnote113"
class="citation">[113]</a> 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 <i>La Plata</i>, Fleeming
mourned him sincerely.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘<i>Nov.</i> 11.—Sunday was too wet to
walk to Isleworth, for which I was sorry, so I staid 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’s about Roman Catholics, which
<i>mutatis mutandis</i> 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
gray coat on. Then I tidied up the coach-house to my own
and Christine’s admiration. Then encouraged by
<i>bouts-rimés</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘All things look so happy for the rain.</p>
<p>‘<i>Nov.</i> 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?</p>
<p>‘<i>Nov.</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘<i>Nov.</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘<i>Dec.</i> 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. . . .</p>
<p>‘<i>Dec.</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘<i>Dec.</i> 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 <i>men</i>. 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.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 instead of vigour; and the result of
that night’s exposure was flying rheumatism varied by
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>‘ . . . . 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 up-stairs, 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 . . .’</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>CHAPTER V.—NOTES OF TELEGRAPH VOYAGES, 1858 TO
1873.</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">But</span> 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.</p>
<h3>I.</h3>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Birkenhead: April 18,
1858.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘He then applied to those eminent engineers, R. S.
Newall & 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 <i>Elba</i> for
that purpose.’ [On this occasion, the <i>Elba</i> 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
<i>Elba</i> 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 <i>Elba</i> to be coiled along in a big coil or
skein.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 12.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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 a 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.</p>
<p>‘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 o’ me.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘S. S. <i>Elba</i>, River
Mersey: May 17.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘S. S. <i>Elba</i>: May
25.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Elba</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘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, <i>Westward Ho</i>! and
Thackeray’s <i>English Humourists</i>. 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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 26.</p>
<p>‘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
<i>Flowers of the Forest</i> and the <i>Low-backed Car</i>.
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
practice on, having had three weeks’ instructions on that
melodious instrument; and if you could hear the horrid sounds
that come! 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘11:30 <span
class="smcap">p.m.</span></p>
<p>‘Long past Cape St. Vincent now. We went within
about 400 yards of the cliffs and light-house 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.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Elba</i> 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 <i>Westward Ho</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Off Bona; June 4.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Elba</i> to Cape Hamrah about three
miles distant. How we fried and sighed! At last, we
reached land under Fort Genova, 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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘We are silent and shy of one another, and soon go out
to watch while turbaned, blue-breeched, barelegged 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 <i>da capo</i>. 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 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Off Cape Spartivento: June
8.</p>
<p>‘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 everyone 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, &c., 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
<i>Elba</i> 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 <i>Elba</i>
[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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 9.</p>
<p>‘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 round in the
<i>Elba</i> to try and help them, letting go the anchor in the
shallowest possible water, this was about sunset. Suddenly
someone 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 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 <i>Saturday Review</i> here; it reads so hot and
feverish, so tomblike 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 10.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 11.</p>
<p>‘9 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>—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.</p>
<p>‘<i>Evening</i>.—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 it 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 everyone 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 12.</p>
<p>‘5.30 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>—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. Oh! 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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘9 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>—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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 13, Sunday.</p>
<p>‘The wind has not gone down, however. It now (at
10.30) blows a pretty stiff gale, the sea has also risen; and the
<i>Elba’s</i> 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 36 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 14.</p>
<p>‘Another day of fatal inaction.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 15.</p>
<p>‘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?</p>
<p>‘9 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>—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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 16.</p>
<p>‘Up this morning at three, coupled my self-acting gear
to the brake 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 <i>Times</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘2 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>—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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 17.</p>
<p>‘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
weird-like 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, &c., 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 18.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘12 <i>o’clock</i>.—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.</p>
<p>‘10 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>—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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 19.</p>
<p>‘10 <span class="smcap">a.m.</span>—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 <i>Times</i>—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.</p>
<p>‘1 <i>o’clock</i>.—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 <i>would</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘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 selfsame tune we heard last night—louder,
however.</p>
<p>‘10 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>—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, &c., on the forecastle; D—, the
foreman of our men, the mates, &c., 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; wiremen, 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 20.</p>
<p>‘It is an ill-wind, &c. 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 21.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 22.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 23.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 24.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Westward Ho</i>! 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 25.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘26th.</p>
<p>‘This morning it came on to blow so heavily that it was
impossible to take up our buoy. The <i>Elba</i> recommenced
rolling in true Baltic style and towards noon we ran for
land.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘27th, Sunday.</p>
<p>‘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 [<span
class="smcap">p.m.</span>] 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 anyone, 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. Someone 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. . . .</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June 28.</p>
<p>‘Since I could not go to Annie I took down Shakespeare,
and by the time I had finished <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, read
the second half of <i>Troilus</i> and got some way in
<i>Coriolanus</i>, 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.</p>
<p>‘10 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>—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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘29th.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘July 2.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Elba’s</i>
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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘July 5.</p>
<p>‘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.’</p>
<h3>II.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 10, 1859.</p>
<p>‘We had a fair wind and we did very well, seeing a
little bit of Cerig 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. <i>Adam Bede</i> in one hand, a sketch-book in the
other, lying on rugs under an awning, I enjoyed a very pleasant
day.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 14.</p>
<p>‘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
<i>Doodah</i> to a passing Greek or two, the second in spending,
no, in making A— spend, threepence on coffee for three.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 16.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 17.</p>
<p>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 Bashibazouk 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 23.</p>
<p>‘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 Arsinoe 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘May 29 (?).</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Elba</i>
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 <i>Elba</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June —.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘June —.</p>
<p>‘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
<i>Elba</i> 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.’</p>
<h3>III.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Cagliari: October 5,
1860.</p>
<p>‘All Tuesday I spent examining what was on board the
<i>Elba</i>, 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 <i>Bahiana</i> 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
<i>fainéant</i>. We left the tent pitched and some
stores in charge of a guide, and ran back to Cagliari.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Cagliari: October 7.</p>
<p>‘[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.</p>
<p>‘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.</p>
<p>‘Decidedly I prefer being master to being man: boats at
all hours, stewards flying for marmalade, captain enquiring 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">‘Bona: October 14.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Elba</i> 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 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>; 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
sand hill, 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.</p>
<p>‘The wind drove a barque, which had anchored near us for
shelter, out to sea. We started, however, at 2 <span
class="smcap">p.m.</span>, 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 Genova 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, &c. 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.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Elba</i> could get hold. I brought all back to
the <i>Elba</i>, 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 <span class="smcap">p.m.</span>, 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.</p>
<p>‘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—“<i>Mon Dieu</i>,” with heroic
resignation, “<i>je veux bien</i>”; or a little
<i>plombodding</i>—“<i>Mais ce que vous voudrez</i>,
<i>Monsieur</i>!”</p>
<p>‘S. S. <i>Elba</i>, somewhere not far from Bona: Oct.
19.</p>
<p>‘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 further
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</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p184ab.jpg">
<img alt=
"Sketch of cable coming up hanging loosely"
title=
"Sketch of cable coming up hanging loosely"
src="images/p184as.jpg" />
</a></p>
<p>instead of taut, thus</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p184bb.jpg">
<img alt=
"Sketch of cable coming up hanging taut"
title=
"Sketch of cable coming up hanging taut"
src="images/p184bs.jpg" />
</a></p>
<p>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 laid
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, &c. To-morrow I expect
to leave for Spartivento.’</p>
<h3>IV.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>‘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 <i>Caroline</i> 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 <i>Caroline</i>. It was cold by this time,
and my arm was rather stiff and I was tired; I hauled myself up
on board the <i>Caroline</i> 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 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 <i>Caroline</i> was just
60 yards too short and did not reach the shore, so although the
<i>Caroline</i> 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 whiskey 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.’</p>
<h3>V.</h3>
<p>Of the 1869 cruise in the <i>Great Eastern</i>, 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.</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 17, 1869.—Here are the names of our
staff in whom I expect you to be interested, as future <i>Great
Eastern</i> 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
<i>Wm. Cory</i>, which laid the Norderney cable, has already gone
to St. Pierre to lay the shore ends. The <i>Hawk</i> and
<i>Chiltern</i> have gone to Brest to lay shore ends. The
<i>Hawk</i> and <i>Scanderia</i> go with us across the Atlantic
and we shall at St. Pierre be transhipped into one or the
other.</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 18. <i>Somewhere in
London</i>.—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.</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 20. <i>Off Ushant</i>.—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 bye and bye 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 <i>do</i> like Thomson. . . .
Tell Austin that the <i>Great Eastern</i> 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.</p>
<p>‘<i>July</i> 12. <i>Great Eastern</i>.—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 <i>Wm. Cory</i>, our pioneer, and a
little dancing boat, the <i>Gulnare</i>, sending signals of
welcome with many-coloured flags. Since then we have been
steaming in a grand procession; but now at 2 <span
class="smcap">a.m.</span> 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?</p>
<p>‘<i>July</i> 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 7 o’clock getting the cable end again, with the main
cable buoy close to us.’</p>
<p><i>A telegram of July</i> 20: ‘I have received your four
welcome letters. The Americans are charming
people.’</p>
<h3>VI.</h3>
<p>And here to make an end are a few random bits about the cruise
to Pernambuco:—</p>
<p>‘<i>Plymouth</i>, <i>June</i> 21, 1873.—I have
been down to the sea-shore and smelt the salt sea and like it;
and I have seen the <i>Hooper</i> pointing her great bow
sea-ward, 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.</p>
<p>‘<i>Lalla Rookh</i>. <i>Plymouth</i>, <i>June</i>
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 everyone says all that is polite
to everyone else, and then the uncertainty when to start.
So far as we know <i>now</i>, 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.</p>
<p>‘<i>S. S. Hooper</i>. <i>Off Funchal</i>,
<i>June</i> 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 <i>Hooper</i> 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 <i>will</i> 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
manœuvre. The cook is very fat and cannot run after
that goat much.</p>
<p>‘<i>Pernambuco</i>, <i>Aug.</i> 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 <i>Hooper</i> 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.’</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VI.—1869–1885.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">Edinburgh—Colleagues—<i>Farrago
Vitæ</i>—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.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The presence of his old classmate, Tait, was one of his early
attractions to the chair; and now that Fleeming is gone again,
Tait still remains, ruling and really teaching his great
classes. Sir Robert Christison was an old friend of his
mother’s; Sir Alexander Grant, Kelland, and Sellar, were
new acquaintances and highly valued; and these too, all but the
last, have been taken from their friends and labours. Death
has been busy in the Senatus. I will speak elsewhere of
Fleeming’s demeanour to his students; and it will be enough
to add here that his relations with his colleagues in general
were pleasant to himself.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>I.</h3>
<p>In Edinburgh, for a considerable time, Fleeming’s
family, to three generations, was united: Mr. and Mrs. Austin at
Hailes, Captain and Mrs. Jenkin in the suburb of Merchiston,
Fleeming himself in the city. It is not every family that
could risk with safety such close interdomestic dealings; but in
this also Fleeming was particularly favoured. Even the two
extremes, Mr. Austin and the Captain, drew together. It is
pleasant to find that each of the old gentlemen set a high value
on the good looks of the other, doubtless also on his own; and a
fine picture they made as they walked the green terrace at
Hailes, conversing by the hour. What they talked of is
still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr. Austin always
declared that on these occasions he learned much. To both
of these families of elders, due service was paid of attention;
to both, Fleeming’s easy circumstances had brought joy; and
the eyes of all were on the grandchildren. In
Fleeming’s scheme of duties, those of the family stood
first; a man was first of all a child, nor did he cease to be so,
but only took on added obligations, when he became in turn a
father. The care of his parents was always a first thought
with him, and their gratification his delight. And the care
of his sons, as it was always a grave subject of study with him,
and an affair never neglected, so it brought him a thousand
satisfactions. ‘Hard work they are,’ as he once
wrote, ‘but what fit work!’ And again:
‘O, it’s a cold house where a dog is the only
representative of a child!’ Not that dogs were
despised; we shall drop across the name of Jack, the harum-scarum
Irish terrier ere we have done; his own dog Plato went up with
him daily to his lectures, and still (like other friends) feels
the loss and looks visibly for the reappearance of his master;
and Martin, the cat, Fleeming has himself immortalised, to the
delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the columns of the
<i>Spectator</i>. 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.</p>
<p>He was even an anxious father; perhaps that is the part where
optimism is hardest tested. He was eager for his sons;
eager for their health, whether of mind or body; eager for their
education; in that, I should have thought, too eager. But
he kept a pleasant face upon all things, believed in play, loved
it himself, shared boyishly in theirs, and knew how to put a face
of entertainment upon business and a spirit of education into
entertainment. If he was to test the progress of the three
boys, this advertisement would appear in their little manuscript
paper:—‘Notice: The Professor of Engineering in the
University of Edinburgh intends at the close of the scholastic
year to hold examinations in the following subjects: (1)
For boys in the fourth class of the Academy—Geometry and
Algebra; (2) For boys at Mr. Henderson’s
school—Dictation and Recitation; (3) For boys taught
exclusively by their mothers—Arithmetic and
Reading.’ Prizes were given; but what prize would be
so conciliatory as this boyish little joke? It may read
thin here; it would smack racily in the playroom. Whenever
his sons ‘started a new fad’ (as one of them writes
to me) they ‘had only to tell him about it, and he was at
once interested and keen to help.’ He would
discourage them in nothing unless it was hopelessly too hard for
them; only, if there was any principle of science involved, they
must understand the principle; and whatever was attempted, that
was to be done thoroughly. If it was but play, if it was
but a puppetshow they were to build, he set them the example of
being no sluggard in play. When Frewen, the second son,
embarked on the ambitious design to make an engine for a toy
steamboat, Fleeming made him begin with a proper
drawing—doubtless to the disgust of the young engineer; but
once that foundation laid, helped in the work with unflagging
gusto, ‘tinkering away,’ for hours, and assisted at
the final trial ‘in the big bath’ with no less
excitement than the boy. ‘He would take any amount of
trouble to help us,’ writes my correspondent.
‘We never felt an affair was complete till we had called
him to see, and he would come at any time, in the middle of any
work.’ There was indeed one recognised playhour,
immediately after the despatch of the day’s letters; and
the boys were to be seen waiting on the stairs until the mail
should be ready and the fun could begin. But at no other
time did this busy man suffer his work to interfere with that
first duty to his children; and there is a pleasant tale of the
inventive Master Frewen, engaged at the time upon a toy crane,
bringing to the study where his father sat at work a half-wound
reel that formed some part of his design, and observing,
‘Papa, you might finiss windin’ this for me; I am so
very busy to-day.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>‘<i>Jan.</i> 15<i>th</i>, 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.’</p>
<p>‘<i>Jan.</i> 17<i>th</i>.—I am learning a great
deal of electrostatics in consequence of the perpetual
cross-examination to which I am subjected. I long for you
on many grounds, but one is that I may not be obliged to deliver
a running lecture on abstract points of science, subject to
cross-examination by two acute students. Bernie does not
cross-examine much; but if anyone gets discomfited, he laughs a
sort of little silver-whistle giggle, which is trying to the
unhappy blunderer.’</p>
<p>‘<i>May</i> 9<i>th</i>.—Frewen is deep in
parachutes. I beg him not to drop from the top landing in
one of his own making.’</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 6<i>th</i>, 1876.—Frewen’s
crank axle is a failure just at present—but he bears
up.’</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 14<i>th</i>.—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.’</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 18<i>th</i>.—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.”’</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 27<i>th</i>.—I do not see what I
could do without Austin. He talks so pleasantly and is so
truly good all through.’</p>
<p>‘<i>June</i> 27<i>th</i>.—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.”’</p>
<p>‘<i>Feb.</i> 18<i>th</i>, 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.’</p>
<p>‘<i>Feb.</i> 19<i>th</i>.—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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It was in 1879 that a new feature was added to the Highland
life: a steam launch, called the <i>Purgle</i>, 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
<i>Purgle</i> 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 <i>Purgle</i>;
and on the morrow about noon, with the bay white with spindrift
and the wind so strong that one could scarcely stand against it,
they got up steam and skulked under the land as far as Sanda
Bay. Here they crept into a seaside cave, and cooked some
food; but the weather now freshening to a gale, it was plain they
must moor the launch where she was, and find their way overland
to some place of shelter. Even to get their baggage from on
board was no light business; for the dingy was blown so far to
leeward every trip, that they must carry her back by hand along
the beach. But this once managed, and a cart procured in
the neighbourhood, they were able to spend the night in a
pot-house on Ault Bea. Next day, the sea was
unapproachable; but the next they had a pleasant passage to
Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell bursting close by
them in the gullies, and the black scarts that sat like ornaments
on the top of every stack and pinnacle, looking down into the
<i>Purgle</i> 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 <i>Purgle</i> 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.</p>
<p>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: ‘<i>fast so gut wie ein bauer</i>,’
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—<i>die silberne Frau</i>, as the folk had
prettily named her from some silver ornaments—was a
‘<i>geborene Gräfin</i>’ 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 ‘<i>gar
schön</i>.’ Joseph’s cousin, Walpurga
Moser, to an orchestra of clarionet and zither, taught the family
the country dances, the Steierisch and the Ländler, and
gained their hearts during the lessons. Her sister Loys,
too, who was up at the Alp with the cattle, came down to church
on Sundays, made acquaintance with the Jenkins, and must have
them up to see the sunrise from her house upon the Loser, where
they had supper and all slept in the loft among the hay.
The Mosers were not lost sight of; Walpurga still corresponds
with Mrs. Jenkin, and it was a late pleasure of Fleeming’s
to choose and despatch a wedding present for his little mountain
friend. This visit was brought to an end by a ball in the
big inn parlour; the refreshments chosen, the list of guests
drawn up, by Joseph; the best music of the place in attendance;
and hosts and guests in their best clothes. The ball was
opened by Mrs. Jenkin dancing Steierisch with a lordly Bauer, in
gray and silver and with a plumed hat; and Fleeming followed with
Walpurga Moser.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>II.</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Acting had always, ever since Rachel and the Marseillaise, a
particular power on him. ‘If I do not cry at the
play,’ he used to say, ‘I want to have my money
back.’ Even from a poor play with poor actors, he
could draw pleasure. ‘Giacometti’s
<i>Elisabetta</i>,’ 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
<i>Othello</i>, 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
<i>Hamlet</i>.—‘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 <i>Academy</i> a notice of
the first performance of <i>Macbeth</i>. 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 <i>Marquis de
Villemer</i>, 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.</p>
<p>But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an
inheritance from Norwich, from Edward Barron, and from Enfield of
the <i>Speaker</i>. The theatre was one of Edward
Barron’s elegant hobbies; he read plays, as became
Enfield’s son-in-law, with a good discretion; he wrote
plays for his family, in which Eliza Barron used to shine in the
chief parts; and later in life, after the Norwich home was broken
up, his little granddaughter would sit behind him in a great
armchair, and be introduced, with his stately elocution, to the
world of dramatic literature. From this, in a direct line,
we can deduce the charades at Claygate; and after money came, in
the Edinburgh days, that private theatre which took up so much of
Fleeming’s energy and thought. The company—Mr.
and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain Charles
Douglas, Mr. Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr.
Charles Baxter, and many more—made a charming society for
themselves and gave pleasure to their audience. Mr. Carter
in Sir Toby Belch it would be hard to beat. Mr. Hole in
broad farce, or as the herald in the <i>Trachiniæ</i>,
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
<i>Taming of the Shrew</i>, 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.</p>
<p>In this laborious annual diversion, Fleeming’s part was
large. I never thought him an actor, but he was something
of a mimic, which stood him in stead. Thus he had seen Got
in Poirier; and his own Poirier, when he came to play it,
breathed meritoriously of the model. The last part I saw
him play was Triplet, and at first I thought it promised
well. But alas! the boys went for a holiday, missed a
train, and were not heard of at home till late at night.
Poor Fleeming, the man who never hesitated to give his sons a
chisel or a gun, or to send them abroad in a canoe or on a horse,
toiled all day at his rehearsal, growing hourly paler, Triplet
growing hourly less meritorious. And though the return of
the children, none the worse for their little adventure, brought
the colour back into his face, it could not restore him to his
part. I remember finding him seated on the stairs in some
rare moment of quiet during the subsequent performances.
‘Hullo, Jenkin,’ said I, ‘you look down in the
mouth.’—‘My dear boy,’ said he,
‘haven’t you heard me? I have not one decent
intonation from beginning to end.’</p>
<p>But indeed he never supposed himself an actor; took a part,
when he took any, merely for convenience, as one takes a hand at
whist; and found his true service and pleasure in the more
congenial business of the manager. Augier, Racine,
Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere’s translation,
Sophocles and Æschylus in Lewis Campbell’s, such were
some of the authors whom he introduced to his public. In
putting these upon the stage, he found a thousand exercises for
his ingenuity and taste, a thousand problems arising which he
delighted to study, a thousand opportunities to make these
infinitesimal improvements which are so much in art and for the
artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the
professional costumer, with unforgetable results of comicality
and indecorum: the second, the <i>Trachiniæ</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>III.</h3>
<p>It did not matter why he entered upon any study or employment,
whether for amusement like the Greek tailoring or the Highland
reels, whether from a desire to serve the public as with his
sanitary work, or in the view of benefiting poorer men as with
his labours for technical education, he ‘pitched into
it’ (as he would have said himself) with the same headlong
zest. I give in the Appendix a letter from Colonel
Fergusson, which tells fully the nature of the sanitary work and
of Fleeming’s part and success in it. It will be
enough to say here that it was a scheme of protection against the
blundering of builders and the dishonesty of plumbers.
Started with an eye rather to the houses of the rich, Fleeming
hoped his Sanitary Associations would soon extend their sphere of
usefulness and improve the dwellings of the poor. In this
hope he was disappointed; but in all other ways the scheme
exceedingly prospered, associations sprang up and continue to
spring up in many quarters, and wherever tried they have been
found of use.</p>
<p>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?’</p>
<p>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 <i>Times</i> with an account of
it was at hand, and by the help of this we made a phonograph
which to our great joy talked, and talked, too, with the purest
American accent. It was so good that a second instrument
was got ready forthwith. Both were shown at the Bazaar: one
by Mrs. Jenkin to people willing to pay half a crown for a
private view and the privilege of hearing their own voices, while
Jenkin, perfervid as usual, gave half-hourly lectures on the
other in an adjoining room—I, as his lieutenant, taking
turns. The thing was in its way a little triumph. A
few of the visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief that they
were the victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle. Of
the others, many who came to scoff remained to take raffle
tickets; and one of the phonographs was finally disposed of in
this way, falling, by a happy freak of the ballot-box, into the
hands of Sir William Thomson.’ The other remained in
Fleeming’s hands, and was a source of infinite
occupation. Once it was sent to London, ‘to bring
back on the tinfoil the tones of a lady distinguished for clear
vocalisations; at another time Sir Robert Christison was brought
in to contribute his powerful bass’; and there scarcely
came a visitor about the house, but he was made the subject of
experiment. The visitors, I am afraid, took their parts
lightly: Mr. Hole and I, with unscientific laughter,
commemorating various shades of Scotch accent, or proposing to
‘teach the poor dumb animal to swear.’ But
Fleeming and Mr. Ewing, when we butterflies were gone, were
laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later
years of my friend were caught from the small utterance of that
toy. Thence came his inquiries into the roots of articulate
language and the foundations of literary art; his papers on vowel
sounds, his papers in the <i>Saturday Review</i> upon the laws of
verse, and many a strange approximation, many a just note, thrown
out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of his
interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph,
because it seems to me that it depicts the man. So, for
Fleeming, one thing joined into another, the greater with the
less. He cared not where it was he scratched the surface of
the ultimate mystery—in the child’s toy, in the great
tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the properties of
energy or mass—certain that whatever he touched, it was a
part of life—and however he touched it, there would flow
for his happy constitution interest and delight. ‘All
fables have their morals,’ says Thoreau, ‘but the
innocent enjoy the story.’ There is a truth
represented for the imagination in these lines of a noble poem,
where we are told, that in our highest hours of visionary
clearness, we can but</p>
<blockquote><p> ‘see the
children sport upon the shore<br />
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>IV.</h3>
<p>It was as a student that I first knew Fleeming, as one of that
modest number of young men who sat under his ministrations in a
soul-chilling class-room at the top of the University
buildings. His presence was against him as a professor: no
one, least of all students, would have been moved to respect him
at first sight: rather short in stature, markedly plain, boyishly
young in manner, cocking his head like a terrier with every mark
of the most engaging vivacity and readiness to be pleased, full
of words, full of paradox, a stranger could scarcely fail to look
at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could scarcely
fail to be engaged by him in talk, but a student would never
regard him as academical. Yet he had that fibre in him that
order always existed in his class-room. I do not remember
that he ever addressed me in language; at the least sign of
unrest, his eye would fall on me and I was quelled. Such a
feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I have
misbehaved in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than
Fleeming Jenkin’s. He was simply a man from whose
reproof one shrank; in manner the least buckrammed of mankind, he
had, in serious moments, an extreme dignity of goodness. So
it was that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate of
students, but a power of which I was myself unconscious. I
was inclined to regard any professor as a joke, and Fleeming as a
particularly good joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast
pleasantry of my curriculum. I was not able to follow his
lectures; I somehow dared not misconduct myself, as was my
customary solace; and I refrained from attending. This
brought me at the end of the session into a relation with my
contemned professor that completely opened my eyes. During
the year, bad student as I was, he had shown a certain leaning to
my society; I had been to his house, he had asked me to take a
humble part in his theatricals; I was a master in the art of
extracting a certificate even at the cannon’s mouth; and I
was under no apprehension. But when I approached Fleeming,
I found myself in another world; he would have naught of
me. ‘It is quite useless for <i>you</i> to come to
me, Mr. Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases, there is no
doubt about yours. You have simply <i>not</i> attended my
class.’ The document was necessary to me for family
considerations; and presently I stooped to such pleadings and
rose to such adjurations, as made my ears burn to remember.
He was quite unmoved; he had no pity for me.—‘You are
no fool,’ said he, ‘and you chose your
course.’ I showed him that he had misconceived his
duty, that certificates were things of form, attendance a matter
of taste. Two things, he replied, had been required for
graduation, a certain competency proved in the final trials and a
certain period of genuine training proved by certificate; if he
did as I desired, not less than if he gave me hints for an
examination, he was aiding me to steal a degree. ‘You
see, Mr. Stevenson, these are the laws and I am here to apply
them,’ said he. I could not say but that this view
was tenable, though it was new to me; I changed my attack: it was
only for my father’s eye that I required his signature, it
need never go to the Senatus, I had already certificates enough
to justify my year’s attendance. ‘Bring them to
me; I cannot take your word for that,’ said he.
‘Then I will consider.’ The next day I came
charged with my certificates, a humble assortment. And when
he had satisfied himself, ‘Remember,’ said he,
‘that I can promise nothing, but I will try to find a form
of words.’ He did find one, and I am still ashamed
when I think of his shame in giving me that paper. He made
no reproach in speech, but his manner was the more eloquent; it
told me plainly what a dirty business we were on; and I went from
his presence, with my certificate indeed in my possession, but
with no answerable sense of triumph. That was the bitter
beginning of my love for Fleeming; I never thought lightly of him
afterwards.</p>
<p>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 <i>her</i> house as
usual.’ An interview thus begun could have but one
ending: if the quarrel were the fault of both, the merit of the
reconciliation was entirely Fleeming’s.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when
men begin to lie down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and
Respectability, the strings of his nature still sounded as high a
note as a young man’s. He loved the harsh voice of
duty like a call to battle. He loved courage, enterprise,
brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that
lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep
upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or the
ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes
to be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved
the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A
fine buoyant sense of life and of man’s unequal character
ran through all his thoughts. He could not tolerate the
spirit of the pick-thank; being what we are, he wished us to see
others with a generous eye of admiration, not with the smallness
of the seeker after faults. If there shone anywhere a
virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was upon the virtue
we must fix our eyes. I remember having found much
entertainment in Voltaire’s <i>Saül</i>, 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.</p>
<p>It was this taste for what is fine in human-kind, that ruled
his choice in books. These should all strike a high note,
whether brave or tender, and smack of the open air. The
noble and simple presentation of things noble and simple, that
was the ‘nitrogenous food’ of which he spoke so much,
which he sought so eagerly, enjoyed so royally. He wrote to
an author, the first part of whose story he had seen with
sympathy, hoping that it might continue in the same vein.
‘That this may be so,’ he wrote, ‘I long with
the longing of David for the water of Bethlehem. But no man
need die for the water a poet can give, and all can drink it to
the end of time, and their thirst be quenched and the pool never
dry—and the thirst and the water are both
blessed.’ It was in the Greeks particularly that he
found this blessed water; he loved ‘a fresh air’
which he found ‘about the Greek things even in
translations’; he loved their freedom from the mawkish and
the rancid. The tale of David in the Bible, the
<i>Odyssey</i>, Sophocles, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Scott;
old Dumas in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray,
and the <i>Tale of Two Cities</i> out of Dickens: such were some
of his preferences. To Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always
faithful; <i>Burnt Njal</i> was a late favourite; and he found at
least a passing entertainment in the <i>Arcadia</i> and the
<i>Grand Cyrus</i>. 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 <i>Agamemnon</i> in the prose of Mr. Buckley, ay, to
Keats. But he was his mother’s son, learning to the
last. He told me one day that literature was not a trade;
that it was no craft; that the professed author was merely an
amateur with a door-plate. ‘Very well,’ said I,
‘the first time you get a proof, I will demonstrate that it
is as much a trade as bricklaying, and that you do not know
it.’ By the very next post, a proof came. I
opened it with fear; for he was indeed, as the reader will see by
these volumes, a formidable amateur; always wrote brightly,
because he always thought trenchantly; and sometimes wrote
brilliantly, as the worst of whistlers may sometimes stumble on a
perfect intonation. But it was all for the best in the
interests of his education; and I was able, over that proof, to
give him a quarter of an hour such as Fleeming loved both to give
and to receive. His subsequent training passed out of my
hands into those of our common friend, W. E. Henley.
‘Henley and I,’ he wrote, ‘have fairly good
times wigging one another for not doing better. I wig him
because he won’t try to write a real play, and he wigs me
because I can’t try to write English.’ When I
next saw him, he was full of his new acquisitions.
‘And yet I have lost something too,’ he said
regretfully. ‘Up to now Scott seemed to me quite
perfect, he was all I wanted. Since I have been learning
this confounded thing, I took up one of the novels, and a great
deal of it is both careless and clumsy.’</p>
<h3>V.</h3>
<p>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 <i>vis comica</i> in private life; he played no character
on the stage, as he could play himself among his friends.
It was one of his special charms; now when the voice is silent
and the face still, it makes it impossible to do justice to his
power in conversation. He was a delightful companion to
such as can bear bracing weather; not to the very vain; not to
the owlishly wise, who cannot have their dogmas canvassed; not to
the painfully refined, whose sentiments become articles of
faith. The spirit in which he could write that he was
‘much revived by having an opportunity of abusing Whistler
to a knot of his special admirers,’ is a spirit apt to be
misconstrued. He was not a dogmatist, even about
Whistler. ‘The house is full of pretty things,’
he wrote, when on a visit; ‘but Mrs. —’s taste
in pretty things has one very bad fault: it is not my
taste.’ And that was the true attitude of his mind;
but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and
wrangle over by the hour. It was no wonder if he loved the
Greeks; he was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been
a sophist and met Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and
done battle with him staunchly and manfully owned his defeat; and
the dialogue, arranged by Plato, would have shown even in
Plato’s gallery. He seemed in talk aggressive,
petulant, full of a singular energy; as vain you would have said
as a peacock, until you trod on his toes, and then you saw that
he was at least clear of all the sicklier elements of
vanity. Soundly rang his laugh at any jest against
himself. He wished to be taken, as he took others, for what
was good in him without dissimulation of the evil, for what was
wise in him without concealment of the childish. He hated a
draped virtue, and despised a wit on its own defence. And
he drew (if I may so express myself) a human and humorous
portrait of himself with all his defects and qualities, as he
thus enjoyed in talk the robust sports of the intelligence;
giving and taking manfully, always without pretence, always with
paradox, always with exuberant pleasure; speaking wisely of what
he knew, foolishly of what he knew not; a teacher, a learner, but
still combative; picking holes in what was said even to the
length of captiousness, yet aware of all that was said rightly;
jubilant in victory, delighted by defeat: a Greek sophist, a
British schoolboy.</p>
<p>Among the legends of what was once a very pleasant spot, the
old Savile Club, not then divorced from Savile Row, there are
many memories of Fleeming. He was not popular at first,
being known simply as ‘the man who dines here and goes up
to Scotland’; but he grew at last, I think, the most
generally liked of all the members. To those who truly knew
and loved him, who had tasted the real sweetness of his nature,
Fleeming’s porcupine ways had always been a matter of keen
regret. They introduced him to their own friends with fear;
sometimes recalled the step with mortification. It was not
possible to look on with patience while a man so lovable thwarted
love at every step. But the course of time and the ripening
of his nature brought a cure. It was at the Savile that he
first remarked a change; it soon spread beyond the walls of the
club. Presently I find him writing: ‘Will you kindly
explain what has happened to me? All my life I have talked
a good deal, with the almost unfailing result of making people
sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to me that I
had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings, but
nevertheless the result was that expressed above. Well,
lately some change has happened. If I talk to a person one
day, they must have me the next. Faces light up when they
see me.—“Ah, I say, come
here,”—“come and dine with me.”
It’s the most preposterous thing I ever experienced.
It is curiously pleasant. You have enjoyed it all your
life, and therefore cannot conceive how bewildering a burst of it
is for the first time at forty-nine.’ And this late
sunshine of popularity still further softened him. He was a
bit of a porcupine to the last, still shedding darts; or rather
he was to the end a bit of a schoolboy, and must still throw
stones, but the essential toleration that underlay his
disputatiousness, and the kindness that made of him a tender
sicknurse and a generous helper, shone more conspicuously
through. A new pleasure had come to him; and as with all
sound natures, he was bettered by the pleasure.</p>
<p>I can best show Fleeming in this later stage by quoting from a
vivid and interesting letter of M. Emile
Trélat’s. Here, admirably expressed, is how he
appeared to a friend of another nation, whom he encountered only
late in life. M. Trélat will pardon me if I correct,
even before I quote him; but what the Frenchman supposed to flow
from some particular bitterness against France, was only
Fleeming’s usual address. Had M. Trélat been
Italian, Italy would have fared as ill; and yet Italy was
Fleeming’s favourite country.</p>
<blockquote><p>Vous savez comment j’ai connu Fleeming
Jenkin! C’était en Mai 1878. Nous
étions tous deux membres du jury de l’Exposition
Universelle. On n’avait rien fait qui vaille à
la première séance de notre classe, qui avait eu
lieu le matin. Tout le monde avait parlé et
reparlé pour ne rien dire. Cela durait depuis huit
heures; il était midi. Je demandai la parole pour
une motion d’ordre, et je proposai que la séance fut
levée à la condition que chaque membre
français, <i>emportât</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Chose singulière! nous nous étions
attachés l’un à l’autre par les
sous-entendus bien plus que par la matière de nos
conversations. À vrai dire, nous étions
presque toujours en discussion; et il nous arrivait de nous rire
au nez l’un et l’autre pendant des heures, tant nous
nous étonnions réciproquement de la
diversité de nos points de vue. Je le trouvais si
Anglais, et il me trouvais si Français! Il
était si franchement révolté de certaines
choses qu’il voyait chez nous, et je comprenais si mal
certaines choses qui se passaient chez vous! Rien de plus
intéressant que ces contacts qui étaient des
contrastes, et que ces rencontres d’idées qui
étaient des choses; rien de si attachant que les
échappées de cœur ou d’esprit
auxquelles ces petits conflits donnaient à tout moment
cours. C’est dans ces conditions que, pendant son
séjour à Paris en 1878, je conduisis un peu partout
mon nouvel ami. Nous allâmes chez Madame Edmond Adam,
où il vit passer beaucoup d’hommes politiques avec
lesquels il causa. Mais c’est chez les ministres
qu’il fut intéressé. Le moment
était, d’ailleurs, curieux en France. Je me
rappelle que, lorsque je le présentai au Ministre du
Commerce, il fit cette spirituelle repartie: ‘C’est
la seconde fois que je viens en France sous la
République. La première fois,
c’était en 1848, elle s’était
coiffée de travers: je suis bien heureux de saluer
aujourd’hui votre excellence, quand elle a mis son chapeau
droit.’ Une fois je le menai voir couronner la
Rosière de Nanterre. Il y suivit les
cérémonies civiles et religieuses; il y assista au
banquet donné par le Maire; il y vit notre de Lesseps,
auquel il porta un toast. Le soir, nous revînmes tard
à Paris; il faisait chaud; nous étions un peu
fatigués; nous entrâmes dans un des rares
cafés encore ouverts. Il devint
silencieux.—‘N’êtes-vous pas content de
votre journée?’ lui dis-je.—‘O, si! mais
je réfléchis, et je me dis que vous êtes un
peuple gai—tous ces braves gens étaient gais
aujourd’hui. C’est une vertu, la gaieté,
et vous l’avez en France, cette vertu!’ Il me
disait cela mélancoliquement; et c’était la
première fois que je lui entendais faire une louange
adressée à la France. . . . Mais il ne faut pas que
vous voyiez là une plainte de ma part. Je serais un
ingrat si je me plaignais; car il me disait souvent: ‘Quel
bon Français vous faites!’ Et il
m’aimait à cause de cela, quoiqu’il
semblât n’aimer pas la France.
C’était là un trait de son
originalité. Il est vrai qu’il s’en
tirait en disant que je ne ressemblai pas à mes
compatriotes, ce à quoi il ne connaissait rien!—Tout
cela était fort curieux; car, moi-même, je
l’aimais quoiqu’il en eût à mon
pays!</p>
<p>En 1879 il amena son fils Austin à Paris.
J’attirai celui-ci. Il déjeunait avec moi deux
fois par semaine. Je lui montrai ce qu’était
l’intimité française en le tutoyant
paternellement. Cela reserra beaucoup nos liens
d’intimité avec Jenkin. . . . Je fis inviter mon ami
au congrès de l’<i>Association française pour
l’avancement des sciences</i>, qui se tenait à
Rheims en 1880. Il y vint. J’eus le plaisir de
lui donner la parole dans la section du génie civil et
militaire, que je présidais. Il y fit une
très intéressante communication, qui me montrait
une fois de plus l’originalité de ses vues et la
sûreté de sa science. C’est à
l’issue de ce congrès que je passai lui faire visite
à Rochefort, où je le trouvai installé en
famille et où je présentai pour la première
fois mes hommages à son éminente compagne. Je
le vis là sous un jour nouveau et touchant pour moi.
Madame Jenkin, qu’il entourait si galamment, et ses deux
jeunes fils donnaient encore plus de relief à sa
personne. J’emportai des quelques heures que je
passai à côte de lui dans ce charmant paysage un
souvenir ému.</p>
<p>J’étais allé en Angleterre en 1882 sans
pouvoir gagner Edimbourg. J’y retournai en 1883 avec
la commission d’assainissement de la ville de Paris, dont
je faisais partie. Jenkin me rejoignit. Je le fis
entendre par mes collègues; car il était fondateur
d’une société de salubrité. Il
eut un grand succès parmi nous. Mais ce voyage me
restera toujours en mémoire parce que c’est
là que se fixa défenitivement notre forte
amitié. Il m’invita un jour à
dîner à son club et au moment de me faire asseoir
à côté de lui, il me retint et me dit:
‘Je voudrais vous demander de m’accorder quelque
chose. C’est mon sentiment que nos relations ne
peuvent pas se bien continuer si vous ne me donnez pas la
permission de vous tutoyer. Voulez-vous que nous nous
tutoyions?’ Je lui pris les mains et je lui dis
qu’une pareille proposition venant d’un Anglais, et
d’un Anglais de sa haute distinction, c’était
une victoire, dont je serais fier toute ma vie. Et nous
commencions à user de cette nouvelle forme dans nos
rapports. Vous savez avec quelle finesse il parlait le
français: comme il en connaissait tous les tours, comme il
jouait avec ses difficultés, et même avec ses
petites gamineries. Je crois qu’il a
été heureux de pratiquer avec moi ce tutoiement,
qui ne s’adapte pas à l’anglais, et qui est si
français. Je ne puis vous peindre
l’étendue et la variété de nos
conversations de la soirée. Mais ce que je puis vous
dire, c’est que, sous la caresse du <i>tu</i>, nos
idées se sont élevées. Nous avions
toujours beaucoup ri ensemble; mais nous n’avions jamais
laissé des banalités s’introduire dans nos
échanges de pensées. Ce soir-là, notre
horizon intellectuel s’est élargie, et nous y avons
poussé des reconnaissances profondes et lointaines.
Après avoir vivement causé à table, nous
avons longuement causé au salon; et nous nous
séparions le soir à Trafalgar Square, après
avoir longé les trottoirs, stationné aux coins des
rues et deux fois rebroussé chemin en nous reconduisant
l’un l’autre. Il était près
d’une heure du matin! Mais quelle belle passe
d’argumentation, quels beaux échanges de sentiments,
quelles fortes confidences patriotiques nous avions
fournies! J’ai compris ce soir là que Jenkin
ne détestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les
mains en l’embrassant. Nous nous quittions aussi amis
qu’on puisse l’être; et notre affection
s’était par lui étendue et comprise dans un
<i>tu</i> français.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>CHAPTER VII. 1875–1885.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">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.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">And</span> 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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, speechmaking, 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
<i>Sermons</i>, even (for her letter’s 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 <i>Prothée</i>,
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 <span
class="smcap">Thankful</span>.’ 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>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 bed-ridden 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 fifth of February, he passed away: aged
eighty-four.</p>
<p>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 eighth of February, she fell asleep:
it is supposed in her seventy-eighth year.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 reënacted honeymoon.</p>
<p>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 twelfth, 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 haunt us.</p>
<h2><a name="page277"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
277</span>APPENDIX.</h2>
<h3>I. <span class="smcap">Note on the Contributions of
Fleeming Jenkin to Electrical and Engineering
Science</span>. <span class="smcap">By Sir William Thomson,
F.R.S., LL. D., etc., etc.</span></h3>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the beginning of the year 1859
my former colleague (the first British University Professor of
Engineering), Lewis Gordon, at that time deeply engaged in the
then new work of cable making and cable laying, came to Glasgow
to see apparatus for testing submarine cables and signalling
through them, which I had been preparing for practical use on the
first Atlantic cable, and which had actually done service upon
it, during the six weeks of its successful working between
Valencia and Newfoundland. As soon as he had seen something
of what I had in hand, he said to me, ‘I would like to show
this to a young man of remarkable ability, at present engaged in
our works at Birkenhead.’ Fleeming Jenkin was
accordingly telegraphed for, and appeared next morning in
Glasgow. He remained for a week, spending the whole day in
my class-room and laboratory, and thus pleasantly began our
lifelong acquaintance. I was much struck, not only with his
brightness <a name="page278"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
278</span>and ability, but with his resolution to understand
everything spoken of, to see if possible thoroughly through every
difficult question, and (no if about this!) to slur over
nothing. I soon found that thoroughness of honesty was as
strongly engrained in the scientific as in the moral side of his
character.</p>
<p>In the first week of our acquaintance, the electric telegraph
and, particularly, submarine cables, and the methods, machines,
and instruments for laying, testing, and using them, formed
naturally the chief subject of our conversations and discussions;
as it was in fact the practical object of Jenkin’s visit to
me in Glasgow; but not much of the week had passed before I found
him remarkably interested in science generally, and full of
intelligent eagerness on many particular questions of dynamics
and physics. When he returned from Glasgow to Birkenhead a
correspondence commenced between us, which was continued without
intermission up to the last days of his life. It commenced
with a well-sustained fire of letters on each side about the
physical qualities of submarine cables, and the practical results
attainable in the way of rapid signalling through them.
Jenkin used excellently the valuable opportunities for experiment
allowed him by Newall, and his partner Lewis Gordon, at their
Birkenhead factory. Thus he began definite scientific
investigation of the copper resistance of the conductor, and the
insulating resistance and specific inductive capacity of its
gutta-percha coating, in the factory, in various stages <a
name="page279"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 279</span>of
manufacture; and he was the very first to introduce
systematically into practice the grand system of absolute
measurement founded in Germany by Gauss and Weber. The
immense value of this step, if only in respect to the electric
telegraph, is amply appreciated by all who remember or who have
read something of the history of submarine telegraphy; but it can
scarcely be known generally how much it is due to Jenkin.</p>
<p>Looking to the article ‘Telegraph (Electric)’ in
the last volume of the old edition of the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ which was published
about the year 1861, we find on record that Jenkin’s
measurements in absolute units of the specific resistance of pure
gutta-percha, and of the gutta-percha with Chatterton’s
compound constituting the insulation of the Red Sea cable of
1859, are given as the only results in the way of absolute
measurements of the electric resistance of an insulating material
which had then been made. These remarks are prefaced in the
‘Encyclopædia’ article by the following
statement: ‘No telegraphic testing ought in future to be
accepted in any department of telegraphic business which has not
this definite character; although it is only within the last year
that convenient instruments for working, in absolute measure,
have been introduced at all, and the whole system of absolute
measure is still almost unknown to practical
electricians.’</p>
<p>A particular result of great importance in respect to testing
is referred to as follows in the ‘Encyclopædia’
<a name="page280"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 280</span>article:
‘The importance of having results thus stated in absolute
measure is illustrated by the circumstance, that the writer has
been able at once to compare them, in the manner stated in a
preceding paragraph, with his own previous deductions from the
testings of the Atlantic cable during its manufacture in 1857,
and with Weber’s measurements of the specific resistance of
copper.’ It has now become universally
adapted—first of all in England; twenty-two years later by
Germany, the country of its birth; and by France and Italy, and
all the other countries of Europe and America—practically
the whole scientific world—at the Electrical Congress in
Paris in the years 1882 and 1884.</p>
<p>An important paper of thirty quarto pages published in the
‘Transactions of the Royal Society’ for June 19,
1862, under the title ‘Experimental Researches on the
Transmission of Electric Signals through submarine cables, Part
I. Laws of Transmission through various lengths of one
cable, by Fleeming Jenkin, Esq., communicated by C. Wheatstone,
Esq., F.R.S.,’ contains an account of a large part of
Jenkin’s experimental work in the Birkenhead factory during
the years 1859 and 1860. This paper is called Part I.
Part II. alas never appeared, but something that it would have
included we can see from the following ominous statement which I
find near the end of Part I.: ‘From this value, the
electrostatical capacity per unit of length and the specific
inductive capacity of the dielectric, could be determined.
These points will, however, be more fully <a
name="page281"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 281</span>treated of
in the second part of this paper.’ Jenkin had in fact
made a determination at Birkenhead of the specific inductive
capacity of gutta-percha, or of the gutta-percha and
Chatterton’s compound constituting the insulation of the
cable, on which he experimented. This was the very first
true measurement of the specific inductive capacity of a
dielectric which had been made after the discovery by Faraday of
the existence of the property, and his primitive measurement of
it for the three substances, glass, shellac, and sulphur; and at
the time when Jenkin made his measurements the existence of
specific inductive capacity was either unknown, or ignored, or
denied, by almost all the scientific authorities of the day.</p>
<p>The original determination of the microfarad, brought out
under the auspices of the British Association Committee on
Electrical Standards, is due to experimental work by Jenkin,
described in a paper, ‘Experiments on Capacity,’
constituting No. IV. of the appendix to the Report presented by
the Committee to the Dundee Meeting of 1867. No other
determination, so far as I know, of this important element of
electric measurement has hitherto been made; and it is no small
thing to be proud of in respect to Jenkin’s fame as a
scientific and practical electrician that the microfarad which we
now all use is his.</p>
<p>The British Association unit of electrical resistance, on
which was founded the first practical approximation to absolute
measurement on the system of Gauss and <a
name="page282"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 282</span>Weber, was
largely due to Jenkin’s zeal as one of the originators, and
persevering energy as a working member, of the first Electrical
Standards Committee. The experimental work of first making
practical standards, founded on the absolute system, which led to
the unit now known as the British Association ohm, was chiefly
performed by Clerk Maxwell and Jenkin. The realisation of
the great practical benefit which has resulted from the
experimental and scientific work of the Committee is certainly in
a large measure due to Jenkin’s zeal and perseverance as
secretary, and as editor of the volume of Collected Reports of
the work of the Committee, which extended over eight years, from
1861 till 1869. The volume of Reports included
Jenkin’s Cantor Lectures of January, 1866, ‘On
Submarine Telegraphy,’ through which the practical
applications of the scientific principles for which he had worked
so devotedly for eight years became part of general knowledge in
the engineering profession.</p>
<p>Jenkin’s scientific activity continued without abatement
to the end. For the last two years of his life he was much
occupied with a new mode of electric locomotion, a very
remarkable invention of his own, to which he gave the name of
‘Telpherage.’ He persevered with endless
ingenuity in carrying out the numerous and difficult mechanical
arrangements essential to the project, up to the very last days
of his work in life. He had completed almost every detail
of the realisation of the system which was recently opened <a
name="page283"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 283</span>for
practical working at Glynde, in Sussex, four months after his
death.</p>
<p>His book on ‘Magnetism and Electricity,’ published
as one of Longman’s elementary series in 1873, marked a new
departure in the exposition of electricity, as the first
text-book containing a systematic application of the quantitative
methods inaugurated by the British Association Committee on
Electrical Standards. In 1883 the seventh edition was
published, after there had already appeared two foreign editions,
one in Italian and the other in German.</p>
<p>His papers on purely engineering subjects, though not
numerous, are interesting and valuable. Amongst these may
be mentioned the article ‘Bridges,’ written by him
for the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia
Britannica,’ and afterwards republished as a separate
treatise in 1876; and a paper ‘On the Practical Application
of Reciprocal Figures to the Calculation of Strains in
Framework,’ read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and
published in the ‘Transactions’ of that Society in
1869. But perhaps the most important of all is his paper
‘On the Application of Graphic Methods to the Determination
of the Efficiency of Machinery,’ read before the Royal
Society of Edinburgh, and published in the
‘Transactions,’ vol. xxviii. (1876–78), for
which he was awarded the Keith Gold Medal. This paper was a
continuation of the subject treated in ‘Reulaux’s
Mechanism,’ and, recognising the value of that work,
supplied the elements required to <a name="page284"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 284</span>constitute from Reulaux’s
kinematic system a full machine receiving energy and doing
work.</p>
<h3>II. <span class="smcap">Note on the work of Fleeming
Jenkin in connection with Sanitary Reform</span>. <span
class="smcap">By Lt. Col. Alexander Fergusson</span>.</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was, I believe, during the
autumn of 1877 that there came to Fleeming Jenkin the first
inkling of an idea, not the least in importance of the many that
emanated from that fertile brain, which, with singular rapidity,
took root, and under his careful fostering expanded into a scheme
the fruits of which have been of the utmost value to his
fellow-citizens and others.</p>
<p>The phrase which afterwards suggested itself, and came into
use, ‘Healthy houses,’ expresses very happily the
drift of this scheme, and the ultimate object that Jenkin had in
view.</p>
<p>In the summer of that year there had been much talk, and some
newspaper correspondence, on the subject of the unsatisfactory
condition of many of the best houses in Edinburgh as regards
their sanitary state. One gentleman, for example, drew an
appalling picture of a large and expensive house he had bought in
the West-end of Edinburgh, fresh from the builder’s
hands. To ascertain precisely what was wrong, and the steps
to be taken to remedy the evils, the effects <a
name="page285"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 285</span>of which
were but too apparent, obviously demanded the expenditure of much
time and careful study on the part of the intelligent proprietor
himself and the professional experts he had to call in, and, it
is needless to add, much money. There came also, from the
poorer parts of the town, the cry that in many cases the houses
of our working people were built anyhow that the dictates of a
narrow economy suggested to the speculative and irresponsible
builder. The horrors of what was called the ‘Sandwich
system,’ amongst other evils, were brought to light.
It is sufficient to say, generally, that this particular practice
of the builder consists in placing in a block of workmen’s
houses, to save space and money, the water cisterns of one flat,
directly under the sanitary appliances of the other, and so on to
the top of a house of several storeys. It is easy to
conceive the abominations that must ensue when the leakage of the
upper floors begins to penetrate to the drinking water
below. The picture was a hideous one, apart from the
well-known fact that a whole class of diseases is habitually
spread by contaminated water.</p>
<p>In October, 1876, a brisk and interesting discussion had been
carried on in the columns of the <i>Times</i> at intervals during
the greater part of that month, in which the same subject, that
of the health and sewage of towns, had been dealt with by several
writers well informed in such matters. Amongst others,
Professor Jenkin himself took part, as did Professor G. F.
Armstrong, <a name="page286"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
286</span>who now occupies the chair of Civil Engineering in
Edinburgh. Many of the truths then advanced had been
recently discussed at a meeting of the British Association.</p>
<p>It was while such topics were attracting attention that
Fleeming Jenkin’s family were shocked by the sad
intelligence of the loss that friends of theirs had sustained in
the deaths of several of their children from causes that could be
traced up to the unsanitary condition of their house.
Sympathy took the practical form of an intense desire that
something might be done to mitigate the chance of such
calamities; and, I am permitted to say, the result of a home-talk
on this subject was an earnest appeal to the head of the house to
turn his scientific knowledge to account in some way that should
make people’s homes more healthy, and their
children’s lives more safe. In answer to the call
Jenkin turned his thoughts in this direction. And the
scheme which I shall endeavour briefly to sketch out was the
result.</p>
<p>The obvious remedy for a faulty house is to call in a skilful
expert, architect or engineer, who will doubtless point out by
means of reports and plans what is wrong, and suggest a remedy;
but, as remarked by Professor Jenkin, ‘it has not been the
practice for leading engineers to advise individuals about their
house arrangements, except where large outlay is in
contemplation.’ A point of very considerable
importance in such a case as that now supposed.</p>
<p><a name="page287"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 287</span>The
problem was to ensure to the great body of the citizens sound
professional advice concerning their houses, such as had hitherto
been only obtainable at great cost—but ‘with due
regard to economical considerations.’</p>
<p>The advantages of co-operation are patent to all.
Everyone can understand how, if a sufficient number of persons
combine, there are few luxuries or advantages that are not within
their reach, for a moderate payment. The advice of a
first-rate engineer regarding a dwelling-house was a palpable
advantage; but within the reach of comparatively few. One
has heard of a winter in Madeira being prescribed as the cure for
a poor Infirmary sufferer.</p>
<p>Like most good plans Jenkin’s scheme was simple in the
extreme, and consisted in <i>combination</i> and a small
subscription.</p>
<p>‘Just,’ he says, ‘as the leading physician
of the day may give his services to great numbers of poor
patients when these are gathered in a hospital, although he could
not practically visit them in their own houses, so the simple
fact of a number of clients gathered into a group will enable the
leading engineer to give them the benefit of his
advice.’</p>
<p>But it was his opinion that only ‘continual supervision
could secure the householder from danger due to defects in
sanitary appliances.’ He had in his eye a case
precisely similar. The following passage in one of his
first lectures, afterwards repeated frequently, conveys <a
name="page288"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 288</span>the essence
of Professor Jenkin’s theory, as well as a graceful
acknowledgment of the source from which this happy idea was
derived:—</p>
<p>‘An analogous case occurred to him,’ he said,
‘in the “Steam Users’ Association,” in
Lancashire. So many boilers burst in that district for want
of inspection that an association was formed for having the
boilers under a continual course of inspection. Let a
perfect boiler be bought from a first-rate maker, the owner has
then an apparatus as perfect as it is now sought to make the
sanitary appliances in his house. But in the course of time
the boiler must decay. The prudent proprietor, therefore,
joins the Steam-boiler Association, which, from time to time,
examines his boiler, and by the tests they apply are able to give
an absolute guarantee against accident. This idea of an
inspection by an association was due,’ the lecturer
continued, ‘to Sir William Fairbairn, under whom he had the
honour of serving his apprenticeship.’ <a
name="citation288"></a><a href="#footnote288"
class="citation">[288]</a> The steam users were thus
absolutely protected from danger; and the same idea it was sought
to apply to the sanitary system of a house.</p>
<p>To bring together a sufficient number of persons, to form such
a ‘group’ as had been contemplated, was the first
step to be taken. No time was lost in taking it. The
idea hitherto roughly blocked out was now given a more definite
form. The original sketch, as <a name="page289"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 289</span>dictated by Jenkin himself, is
before me, and I cannot do better than transcribe it, seeing it
is short and simple. Several important alterations were
afterwards made by himself in consultation with one or two of his
Provisional Council; and as experience suggested:—</p>
<blockquote><p>‘The objects of this Association are
twofold.</p>
<p>‘1. By taking advantage of the principle of
co-operation, to provide its members at moderate cost with such
advice and supervision as shall ensure the proper sanitary
condition of their own dwellings.</p>
<p>‘2. By making use of specially qualified officers
to support the inhabitants and local authorities in enforcing
obedience to the provisions of those laws and by-laws which
affect the sanitary condition of the community.</p>
<p>‘It is proposed that an Association with these objects
be formed; and that all residents within the municipal boundaries
of Edinburgh be eligible as members. That each member of
the Association shall subscribe <i>one guinea</i> annually.
That in return for the annual subscription each member shall be
entitled to the following advantages:—</p>
<p>‘1. A report by the Engineer of the Association on
the sanitary condition of his dwelling, with specific
recommendations as to the improvement of drainage, ventilation,
&c., should this be found necessary.</p>
<p>‘2. The supervision of any alterations in the
sanitary fittings of his dwelling which may be carried out by the
advice, or with the approval, of the officers of the
Association.</p>
<p><a name="page290"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
290</span>‘3. An annual inspection of his premises by
the Engineer of the Association, with a report as to their
sanitary condition.</p>
<p>‘4. The right, in consideration of a payment of
five shillings, of calling on the Engineer, and legal adviser <a
name="citation290"></a><a href="#footnote290"
class="citation">[290]</a> of the Association to inspect and
report on the existence of any infraction or supposed infraction
of any law affecting the sanitary condition of the community.</p>
<p>‘It is proposed that the Association should be managed
by an unpaid Council, to be selected by ballot from among its
members.</p>
<p>‘That the following salaried officers be engaged by the
Association:</p>
<p>‘1. One or more acting engineers, who should give
their services exclusively to the Association.</p>
<p>‘2. A consulting engineer, who should exercise a
general supervision, and advise both on the general principles to
be followed, and on difficult cases.</p>
<p>‘3. A legal agent, to be engaged on such terms as
the Council shall hereafter think fit.</p>
<p>‘4. A permanent secretary.</p>
<p>‘It is also proposed that the officers of the
Association should, with the sanction of the Council, have power
to take legal proceedings against persons who shall, in their
opinion, be guilty of any infraction of sanitary regulations in
force throughout the district; and generally it is intended that
the Association shall <a name="page291"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 291</span>further and promote all undertakings
which, in their opinion, are calculated to improve the sanitary
condition of Edinburgh and its immediate neighbourhood.</p>
<p>‘In one aspect this Association will be analogous to the
Steam Boiler Users’ Association, who co-operate in the
employment of skilled inspectors. In a second aspect it
will be analogous to the Association for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, which assists the community in enforcing
obedience to existing laws.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Towards the end of November, 1877, this paper was handed about
among those who were thought most likely, from their position and
public spirit, to forward such a scheme, so clearly for the good
of the community. Nay more, a systematic
‘canvass’ was set on foot; personal application the
most direct was made use of. The thing was new, and its
advantages not perfectly obvious to all at a glance.
Everyone who knows with what enthusiastic earnestness Jenkin
would take hold of, and insist upon, what he felt to be wholesome
and right will understand how he persisted, how he patiently
explained, and swept away objections that were raised. One
could not choose but listen, and understand, and agree.</p>
<p>On the evening of 2nd January, 1878, or, to be more correct,
the morning of the 3rd, two old school-fellows of his at the
Edinburgh Academy walked home with him from an annual dinner of
their ‘Class.’ All the way in glowing language
he expounded his views of house inspection, and the protection of
health, asking <a name="page292"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
292</span>for sympathy. It was most readily given, and they
parted from him with pleasant words of banter regarding this
vision of his of grafting ‘cleanliness’ upon another
quality said to be a growth, in some sort, of this northern land
of ours.</p>
<p>But they reckoned hardly sufficiently on the fact that when
Jenkin took a thing of this kind in hand it must <i>be</i>; if it
lay within the scope of a clear head and boundless energy.</p>
<p>Having secured a nucleus of well-wishers, the next step was to
enlist the sympathies of the general public. It was sought
to effect this by a series of public lectures. The first of
these (one of two) was given on 22nd January under the auspices
of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. It was apparent
to the shrewd lecturer that in bringing before the people a
scheme like this, where there was much that was novel, it was
necessary first of all that his audience should be aware of the
evils to which they were exposed in their own houses, before
unfolding a plan for a remedy. The correspondence already
referred to as having been carried on in the summer of the
previous year had shown how crude were the ideas of many persons
well informed, or considered to be so, on this subject. For
example, there are few now-a-days who are not aware that a drain,
to be safe, must have at intervals along its course openings to
the upper air, or that it must be ‘ventilated,’ as
the phrase goes. But at the time spoken of there were some
who went so far as to <a name="page293"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 293</span>question this principle; even to
argue against it; calling forth this forcible
reply—’Here is a pretty farce. You pour out a
poison and send it off on its way to the sea, and forget that on
its way there its very essence will take wings and fly back into
your house up the very pipes it but recently ran
down.’ A properly ‘trapped’ and
ventilated drain was the cure for this.</p>
<p>And the lecturer proceeded to show that in Edinburgh, where
for the most part house construction is good and solid, but, as
in other towns, the bulk of the houses were built when the
arrangements for internal sewerage and water supply were very
little understood, many serious errors were made.
‘But,’ the lecturer went on to say, ‘Sanitary
Science was now established on a fairly sound basis, and the germ
theory, or theory of septic ferments, had explained much which
used to be obscure. This theory explained how it was that
families might in certain cases live with fair health for many
years in the midst of great filth, while the dwellers in large
and apparently clean mansions were struck down by fever and
diphtheria. The filth which was found compatible with
health was always isolated filth, and until the germs of some
specific disease were introduced, this dirt was merely injurious,
not poisonous. The mansions which were apparently clean and
yet fever-visited were found to be those in which arrangements
had been made for the removal of offensive matter, which
arrangements served also to distribute poison germs from one
house to another, from one <a name="page294"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 294</span>room to another. These
mansions had long suckers extended from one to another through
the common sewer. Through these suckers, commonly called
“house drains,” they imbibed every taint which any
one house in the system could supply. In fact, arrangements
were too often made which simply “laid on” poison to
bed-rooms just as gas or water was laid on. He had known an
intelligent person declare that no harm could come up a certain
pipe which ended in a bed-room, because nothing offensive went
down. That person had never realised the fact that his pipe
joined another pipe, which again joined a sewer, which again
whenever there was an epidemic in the neighbourhood, received
innumerable poison germs; and that, although nothing more serious
than scented soap and water went down, the germs of typhoid fever
might any day come up.’</p>
<p>Professor Jenkin then proceeded to show how a house might be
absolutely cut off from all contamination from these sources of
evil. Then by means of large diagrams he showed the several
systems of pipes within a house. One system coloured
<i>red</i> showed the pipes that received foul matter. A
system marked in <i>blue</i> showed pipes used to ventilate this
red system. The essential conditions of safety in the
internal fittings of a house—it was inculcated—were
that no air to be breathed, no water to be drunk, should ever be
contaminated by connection with <i>red</i> or <i>blue</i>
systems. Then in <i>yellow</i> were shown the pipes which
received <a name="page295"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
295</span>dirty water, which was not necessarily foul.
Lastly a <i>white</i> system, which under no circumstances must
ever touch the ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ or
‘yellow’ systems. Such a diagram recalled the
complicated anatomical drawings which illustrate the system of
arteries and veins in the human frame. Little wonder, then,
that one gentleman remarked, in perplexity, that he had not room
in his house for such a mass of pipes; but they were already
there, with other pipes besides, all carefully hidden away, as in
the human tenement, with the inevitable result—as the
preacher of cleanliness and health declared—‘out of
sight, out of mind.’</p>
<p>In plain and forcible language were demonstrated the ills this
product of modern life is heir to; and the drastic measures that
most of them demand to secure the reputation of a healthy
house. Lastly the formation of an Association to carry out
the idea (already sketched) cheaply, was briefly introduced.</p>
<p>Next morning, January 23rd, was the moment chosen to lay the
scheme formally before the public. In all the Edinburgh
newspapers, along with lengthy reports of the lecture, appeared,
in form of an advertisement, a statement <a
name="citation295"></a><a href="#footnote295"
class="citation">[295]</a> of the scheme and its objects,
supported <a name="page296"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
296</span>by an imposing array of ‘Provisional
Council.’ In due course several of the Scots
newspapers and others, such as the <i>Building News</i>, gave
leading articles, all of them directing attention to this new
thing, as ‘an interesting experiment about to be tried in
Edinburgh,’ ‘what promises to be a very useful
sanitary movement, now being organised, and an example set that
may be worthy of imitation elsewhere,’ and so on.</p>
<p>Several of the writers waxed eloquent on the singular
ingenuity of the scheme; the cheap professional advice to its
adherents, &c.; and the rare advantages to be gained by means
of co-operation and the traditional ‘one pound
one.’</p>
<p>The Provisional Council was absolutely representative of the
community, and included names more than sufficient to inspire
confidence. It included the Lord-Lieutenant of the county,
Lord Rosebery; the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Moncrieff; the Lord
Advocate; Sir Robert Christison; several of the Judges of the
Court of Session; the Presidents of the Colleges of Physicians,
and of Surgeons; many of the Professors of the University; the
Bishop of Edinburgh, and the <a name="page297"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 297</span>Dean; several of the best known of
the Clergy of the Church of Scotland, Established, Free, and of
other branches; one or two members of Parliament; more than one
lady (who should have been perhaps mentioned earlier on this
list) well known for large views and public spirit; several
well-known country gentlemen; one or two distinguished civil
engineers and architects; and many gentlemen of repute for
intelligence and business qualities.</p>
<p>Very soon after the second of the promised lectures, the
members of the new Society began to be numbered by
hundreds. By the 28th of February, 500 subscribers having
been enrolled, they were in a position to hold their first
regular meeting under the presidency of Sir Robert Christison,
when a permanent Council composed of many of those who had from
the first shown an interest in the movement—for example,
Professor (now Sir Douglas) Maclagan and Lord Dean of Guild (now
Sir James) Gowans, Professor Jenkin himself undertaking the
duties of Consulting Engineer—were appointed. And
Jenkin was singularly fortunate in securing as Secretary the late
Captain Charles Douglas, a worker as earnest as himself. It
was the theory of the originator that the Council, composed of
leading men not necessarily possessed of engineering knowledge,
should ‘give a guarantee to the members that the officials
employed should have been carefully selected, and themselves work
under supervision. Every householder in this town,’
he <a name="page298"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 298</span>adds,
‘knows the names of the gentlemen composing our
Council.’</p>
<p>The new Association was a success alike in town and
country. Without going far into statistics it will be
evident what scope there was, and is, for such operations when it
is stated that last year (1885) 60 per cent. of the houses
inspected in London and its neighbourhood were found to have foul
air escaping direct into them, and 81 per cent. had their
sanitary appliances in an unsatisfactory state. Here in
Edinburgh things were little, if any, better; as for the country
houses, the descriptions of some were simply appalling. As
the new Association continued its operations it became the
<i>rôle</i> of the Consulting Engineer to note such
objections, hypothetical or real, as were raised against the
working of his scheme. Some of these were ingenious enough:
but all were replied to in order, and satisfactorily
resolved. It was shown, for example, that ‘you might
have a dinner party in your house on the day of your
inspection’; that the Association worked in the utmost
harmony with the city authorities, and with the tradesmen usually
employed in such business; and that the officials were as
‘confidential’ as regards the infirmities of a house
as any physician consulted by a patient. The strength of
the engineering staff has been varied from time to time as
occasion required; at the moment of writing employment is found
in Edinburgh and country districts in various parts of Scotland
for five engineers temporarily or permanently engaged.</p>
<p><a name="page299"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 299</span>The
position Jenkin claimed for the Engineers was a high one, but not
too high: thus he well defined it:—</p>
<blockquote><p>‘In respect of Domestic Sanitation the
business of the Engineer and that of the medical man overlap; for
while it is the duty of the engineer to learn from the doctor
what conditions are necessary to secure health, the engineer may,
nevertheless, claim in his turn the privilege of assisting in the
warfare against disease by using his professional skill to
determine what mechanical and constructive arrangements are best
adapted to secure these conditions.’ <a
name="citation299"></a><a href="#footnote299"
class="citation">[299]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Flattery in the form of imitation followed in due
course. A branch was established at St. Andrews, and one of
the earliest of similar institutions was founded at Newport in
the United States. Another sprang up at
Wolverhampton. In 1881 two such societies were announced as
having been set on foot in London. And the <i>Times</i> of
April 14th, in a leading article of some length, drew attention
to the special features of the plan which it was stated had
followed close upon a paper read by Professor Fleeming Jenkin
before the Society of Arts in the preceding month of
January. The adherents included such names as those of Sir
William Gull, Professor Huxley, Professor Burdon Sanderson, and
Sir Joseph Fayrer. The <i>Saturday Review</i>, in January,
had already in a characteristic article enforced the principles
of the scheme, and shown how, for a small annual payment,
‘the helpless and hopeless <a name="page300"></a><span
class="pagenum">p. 300</span>condition of the householder at the
mercy of the plumber’ might be for ever changed.</p>
<p>The London Association, established on the lines of the parent
society, has been followed by many others year by year; amongst
these are Bradford, Cheltenham, Glasgow, and Liverpool in 1882;
Bedford, Brighton, and Newcastle in 1883; Bath, Cambridge,
Cardiff, Dublin, and Dundee in 1884; and Swansea in 1885; and
while we write the first steps are being taken, with help from
Edinburgh, to establish an association at Montreal; sixteen
Associations.</p>
<p>Almost, it may be said, a bibliography has been achieved for
Fleeming Jenkin’s movement.</p>
<p>In 1878 was published <i>Healthy Houses</i> (Edin., David
Douglas), being the substance of the two lectures already
mentioned as having been delivered in Edinburgh with the
intention of laying open the idea of the scheme then in
contemplation, with a third addressed to the Medico-Chirurgical
Society. This book has been long out of print, and such has
been the demand for it that the American edition <a
name="citation300"></a><a href="#footnote300"
class="citation">[300]</a> is understood to be also out of print,
and unobtainable.</p>
<p>In 1880 was printed (London, Spottiswoode & Co.) a
pamphlet entitled <i>What is the Best Mode of Amending the
Present Laws with Reference to Existing Buildings</i>, <a
name="page301"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 301</span><i>and also
of Improving their Sanitary Condition with due Regard to
Economical Considerations</i>?—the substance of a paper
read by Professor Jenkin at the Congress of the Social Science
Association at Edinburgh in October of that year.</p>
<p>The first item of <i>Health Lectures for the People</i>
(Edin., 1881) consists of a discourse on the ‘Care of the
Body’ delivered by Professor Jenkin in the Watt Institution
at Edinburgh, in which the theories of house sanitation are dwelt
on.</p>
<p><i>House Inspection</i>, reprinted from the <i>Sanitary
Record</i>, was issued in pamphlet form in 1882. And
another small tract, <i>Houses of the Poor</i>; <i>their Sanitary
Arrangement</i>, in 1885.</p>
<p>In this connection it may be said that while the idea
formulated by Jenkin has been carried out with a measure of
success that could hardly have been foreseen, in one point only,
it may be noted, has expectation been somewhat disappointed as
regards the good that these Associations should have
effected—and the fact was constantly deplored by the
founder—namely, the comparative failure as a means of
improving the condition of the dwellings of the poorer
classes. It was ‘hoped that charity and public spirit
would have used the Association to obtain reports on poor
tenements, and to remedy the most glaring evils.’ <a
name="citation301"></a><a href="#footnote301"
class="citation">[301]</a></p>
<p><a name="page302"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 302</span>The
good that these associations have effected is not to be estimated
by the numbers of their membership. They have educated the
public on certain points. The fact that they exist has
become generally known, and, by consequence, persons of all
classes are induced to satisfy themselves of the reasons for the
existence of such institutions, and thus they learn of the evils
that have called them into being.</p>
<p>Builders, burgh engineers, and private individuals in any way
connected with the construction of dwellings in town or country
have been put upon their mettle, and constrained to keep
themselves abreast with the wholesome truths which the
engineering staff of all these Sanitary Associations are the
means of disseminating.</p>
<p>In this way, doubtless, some good may indirectly have been
done to poorer tenements, though not exactly in the manner
contemplated by the founder.</p>
<p>Now, if it be true that Providence helps those who help
themselves, surely a debt of gratitude is due to him who has
placed (as has been attempted to be shown in this brief
narrative) the means of self-help and the attainment of a
palpable benefit within the reach of all through the working of a
simple plan, whose motto well may be, ‘Healthy
Houses’; and device a strangled snake.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">A. F.</p>
<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
<p><a name="footnote113"></a><a href="#citation113"
class="footnote">[113]</a> <i>Reminiscences of My Later
Life</i>, by Mary Howitt, <i>Good Words</i>, May 1886.</p>
<p><a name="footnote288"></a><a href="#citation288"
class="footnote">[288]</a> See paper read at the Congress
of the Social Science Association, Edinburgh, October 8,
1880.</p>
<p><a name="footnote290"></a><a href="#citation290"
class="footnote">[290]</a> It was ultimately agreed not to
appoint an officer of this kind till occasion should arise for
his services; none has been appointed.</p>
<p><a name="footnote295"></a><a href="#citation295"
class="footnote">[295]</a> Briefly stated, the points
submitted in this prospectus were these:</p>
<p>1. That the proposed Association was a Society for the
benefit of its members and the community that cannot be used for
any purposes of profit.</p>
<p>2. The privileges of members include the annual
inspection of their premises, as well as a preliminary report on
their condition with an estimate of the cost of any alterations
recommended.</p>
<p>3. The skilled inspection from time to time of drains
and all sanitary arrangements.</p>
<p>4. No obligation on the part of members to carry out any
of the suggestions made by the engineers of the Association, who
merely give skilled advice when such is desired.</p>
<p>5. The officers of the Association to have no interest
in any outlay recommended.</p>
<p>6. The Association might be of great service to the
poorer members of the community.</p>
<p><a name="footnote299"></a><a href="#citation299"
class="footnote">[299]</a> <i>Healthy Houses</i>, by
Professor Fleeming Jenkin, p. 54.</p>
<p><a name="footnote300"></a><a href="#citation300"
class="footnote">[300]</a> It is perhaps worth mentioning
as a curiosity of literature that the American publishers who
produced this book in the States, without consulting the author,
afterwards sent him a handsome cheque, of course unsolicited by
him.</p>
<p><a name="footnote301"></a><a href="#citation301"
class="footnote">[301]</a> It is true, handsome tenements
for working people have been built, such as the picturesque group
of houses erected with this object by a member of the Council of
the Edinburgh Sanitary Association, at Bell’s Mills, so
well seen from the Dean Bridge, where every appliance that
science can suggest has been made use of. But for the
ordinary houses of the poor the advice of the Association’s
engineers has been but rarely taken advantage of.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN***</p>
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