Transcribed from the 1901 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org

                                  MEMOIR
                                    OF
                             FLEEMING JENKIN

                                    BY
                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

                                 NEW YORK
                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                   1901

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to
publish a selection of his various papers; by way of introduction, the
following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable
volumes, has been issued in England.  In the States, it has not been
thought advisable to reproduce the whole; and the memoir appearing alone,
shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its
justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to a
stranger out of all proportion.  But Jenkin was a man much more
remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him.  It was
in the world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude
towards life, by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort,
that he struck the minds of his contemporaries.  His was an individual
figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the
pages of a novel.  His was a face worth painting for its own sake.  If
the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin,
after his death, shall not continue to make new friends, the fault will
be altogether mine.

                                                                   R. L S.

SARANAC, _Oct._, 1887.

CHAPTER I.

The Jenkins of Stowting—Fleeming’s grandfather—Mrs. Buckner’s
fortune—Fleeming’s father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King Tom;
service in the West Indies; end of his career—The
Campbell-Jacksons—Fleeming’s mother—Fleeming’s uncle John.

IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to
come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans,
are found reputably settled in the county of Kent.  Persons of strong
genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in
1555, to his contemporary ‘John Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver
General of the County,’ and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the
proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree—a prince; ‘Guaith Voeth, Lord of
Cardigan,’ the name and style of him.  It may suffice, however, for the
present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew to
wealth and consequence in their new home.

Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was
William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but no
less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century and a half, a
Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the same place of
humble honour.  Of their wealth we know that in the reign of Charles I.,
Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying land,
and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court.  This was an
estate of some 320 acres, six miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and
Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown _in
capite_ by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage
of the sea at Sandgate.  It had a chequered history before it fell into
the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to
another—to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys,
Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes:
a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no man’s
home.  But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin family in
Kent; and though passed on from brother to brother, held in shares
between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and jointures, and at least
once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the hands of the
direct line.  It is not my design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to
give a history of this obscure family.  But this is an age when genealogy
has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first time a human
science; so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but
to trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we study,
we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton.  Not only do
our character and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
during generations; but the very plot of our life’s story unfolds itself
on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the man is only an episode
in the epic of the family.  From this point of view I ask the reader’s
leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with
the accession of his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.

This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
‘Westward Ho!’ was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam.  The Jenkins had now been long
enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
connection is singularly involved.  John and his wife were each descended
in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York.  John’s mother had
married a Frewen for a second husband.  And the last complication was to
be added by the Bishop of Chichester’s brother, Charles Buckner,
Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire’s
wife, and already the widow of another Frewen.  The reader must bear Mrs.
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
life as a poor man.  Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
immediate circle, was in her old age ‘a great genealogist of all Sussex
families, and much consulted.’  The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name that the
family was ruined.

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
unpractical sons.  The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example of
the clergy of the age.  He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all the family, very choice in
horses.  He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously.  His saddle horse,
Captain (for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family
chronicle which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as
the vicar’s foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn
in the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door.  Debt was the
man’s proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his
church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy.  At an
early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he had
two daughters and one son.  One of the daughters died unmarried; the
other imitated her father, and married ‘imprudently.’  The son, still
more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded himself
with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was
lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_.  If he did not marry
below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle
William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.

The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post-Office,
followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married ‘not very
creditably,’ and spent all the money he could lay his hands on.  He died
without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak intellect
and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief career as
one of Mrs. Buckner’s satellites will fall to be considered later on.  So
soon, then, as the _Minotaur_ had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting
and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third
brother, Charles.

Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by
these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;
but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness
both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a
virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his
relatives.  Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt
both salt water and powder.  The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as
I can make out, to the land service.  Stephen’s son had been a soldier;
William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy
Braddock’s in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an
estate on the James River, called, after the parental seat; of which I
should like well to hear if it still bears the name.  It was probably by
the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by
his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction
of the navy; and it was in Buckner’s own ship, the _Prothée_, 64, that
the lad made his only campaign.  It was in the days of Rodney’s war, when
the _Prothée_, we read, captured two large privateers to windward of
Barbadoes, and was ‘materially and distinguishedly engaged’ in both the
actions with De Grasse.  While at sea Charles kept a journal, and made
strange archaic pilot-book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of
which survive for the amusement of posterity.  He did a good deal of
surveying, so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of
Fleeming’s education as an engineer.  What is still more strange, among
the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room of the
_Prothée_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for all the
world as it would have been done by his grandson.

On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
scurvy, received his mother’s orders to retire; and he was not the man to
refuse a request, far less to disobey a command.  Thereupon he turned
farmer, a trade he was to 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.

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_l._, mostly in land—she was in
perpetual quest of an heir.  The mirage of this fortune hung before
successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it
dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.
The grandniece, Stephen’s daughter, the one who had not ‘married
imprudently,’ appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by
the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792.  Next she adopted
William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with her—it
seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up with him in Paris by
the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a place in the
King’s Body-Guard, where he attracted the notice of George III. by his
proficiency in German.  In 1797, being on guard at St. James’s Palace,
William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more
left heirless.  Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a
kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by the good looks and
the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon
Charles Jenkin.  He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to be
the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of family farming.  Mrs. Jenkin,
the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs. Buckner, 570, some at
Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one-half of Stowting to a tenant,
and threw the other and various scattered parcels into the common
enterprise; so that the whole farm amounted to near upon a thousand
acres, and was scattered over thirty miles of country.  The ex-seaman of
thirty-nine, on whose wisdom and ubiquity the scheme depended, was to
live in the meanwhile without care or fear.  He was to check himself in
nothing; his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless brothers,
were to be indulged in comfort; and whether the year quite paid itself or
not, whether successive years left accumulated savings or only a growing
deficit, the fortune of the golden aunt should in the end repair all.

On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church
House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three, among the
number.  Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that
followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach
and six, two post-horses and their own four; of the house full of
visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants’ hall
laid for thirty or forty for a month together; of the daily press of
neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and
Dynes, were also kinsfolk; and the parties ‘under the great spreading
chestnuts of the old fore court,’ where the young people danced and made
merry to the music of the village band.  Or perhaps, in the depth of
winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would
ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the
pony’s saddle girths, and be received by the tenants like princes.

This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of
the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of the lads.
John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, ‘loud and notorious with his
whip and spurs,’ settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for
the shoes of his father and his aunt.  Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is
briefly dismissed as ‘a handsome beau’; but he had the merit or the good
fortune to become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he
was not empty-handed for the war of life.  Charles, at the day-school of
Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became
matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner.  Hereupon
that tall, rough-voiced, formidable uncle entered with the lad into a
covenant: every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral
a penny; 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.

From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye, where
the master took ‘infinite delight’ in strapping him.  ‘It keeps me warm
and makes you grow,’ he used to say.  And the stripes were not altogether
wasted, for the dunce, though still very ‘raw,’ made progress with his
studies.  It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea, always a
ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the glory was not
altogether future, it wore a present form when he came driving to Rye
behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral.  ‘I was not a
little proud, you may believe,’ says he.

In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father
to Chichester to the Bishop’s Palace.  The Bishop had heard from his
brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an order
from Lord Melville for the lad’s admission to the Royal Naval College at
Portsmouth.  Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the head and
said, ‘Charles will restore the old family’; by which I gather with some
surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam and golden
hope of my aunt’s fortune, the family was supposed to stand in need of
restoration.  But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all
to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and
Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.

What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in which
he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety and
greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor,
where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord Melville’s and Lord
Harcourt’s and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have ‘bumptious notions,’
and his head was ‘somewhat turned with fine people’; as to some extent it
remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.

In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain
Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie.  The captain had earned this
name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the
pages of Marryat: ‘Put the prisoner’s head in a bag and give him another
dozen!’ survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often
punished twice or thrice in a week.  On board the ship of this
disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from
Sheerness in December, 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his
pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which
were ordered into the care of the gunner.  ‘The old clerks and mates,’ he
writes, ‘used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,
and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish smuggler.
This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little offensive.’

The _Conqueror_ carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at
the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July, 1817,
she relieved the 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 _Conqueror_ had lost one hundred and ten men
and invalided home one hundred and seven, being more than a third of her
complement.  It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as once
set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more fortunate
than some of his comrades.  He drew in water-colour; not so badly as his
father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the _Conqueror_
that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured him some
alleviations.  Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and
here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the
historic house.  One of these is before me as I write, and gives a
strange notion of the arts in our old English Navy.  Yet it was again as
an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a
second outing in a ten-gun brig.  These, and a cruise of six weeks to
windward of the island undertaken by the _Conqueror_ herself in quest of
health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and at
the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having ‘lost his health
entirely.’

As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career
came to an end.  For forty-two years he continued to serve his country
obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and honourable
services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction.  He was
first two years in the _Larne_, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and keeping
a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago.  Captain
Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the
Ionian Islands—King Tom as he was called—who frequently took passage in
the _Larne_.  King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean, and was a
terror to the officers of the watch.  He would come on deck at night; and
with his broad 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 _Cambrian_, kept the Greeks in order afloat,’ writes my
author, ‘and King Tom ashore.’

From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin’s activities was in
the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a
subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, ‘then very
notorious’ in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying
dollars and provisions for the Government.  While yet a midshipman, he
accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar.  In the
brigantine _Griffon_, which he commanded in his last years in the West
Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice
earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to
extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money
due to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in San
Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous imprisonment
and the recovery of a ‘chest of money’ of which they had been robbed.
Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of public censure.  This was
in 1837, when he commanded the _Romney_ lying in the inner harbour of
Havannah.  The _Romney_ was in no proper sense a man-of-war; she was a
slave-hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where
negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained
provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case and
either set them free or bind them to apprenticeship.  To this ship,
already an 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 _Romney_ would be ordered at
once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission
compromised.  Without consultation with any other officer, Captain Jenkin
(then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and took the
Captain-General’s receipt.  Lord Palmerston approved his course; but the
zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never to be named without
respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-nine years later, the matter
was again canvassed in Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin
defended by Admiral Erskine in a letter to the _Times_ (March 13, 1876).

In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot’s
flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty pennants;
and about the same time, closed his career by an act of personal bravery.
He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose
cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches;
his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and
Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were no
longer answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and slung
up several insensible men with his own hand.  For this act, he received a
letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of his
gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted Commander, superseded, and
could never again obtain employment.

In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell Jackson, who introduced him to his
family in Jamaica.  The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos
Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally
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.

The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, became the
wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the subject of this
notice, Fleeming Jenkin.  She was a woman of parts and courage.  Not
beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of seeming so; played the
part of a belle in society, while far lovelier women were left
unattended; and up to old age had much of both the exigency and the charm
that mark that character.  She drew naturally, for she had no training,
with unusual skill; and it was from her, and not from the two naval
artists, that Fleeming inherited his eye and hand.  She played on the
harp and sang with something beyond the talent of an amateur.  At the age
of seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of youthful
enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without introduction,
found her way into the presence of the _prima donna_ and begged for
lessons.  Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she had done, and though
she refused to be her mistress, placed her in the hands of a friend.  Nor
was this all, for when Pasta returned to Paris, she sent for the girl
(once at least) to test her progress.  But Mrs. Jenkin’s talents were not
so remarkable as her fortitude and strength of will; and it was in an art
for which she had no natural taste (the art of literature) that she
appeared before the public.  Her novels, though they attained and merited
a certain popularity both in France and England, are a measure only of
her courage.  They were a task, not a beloved task; they were written for
money in days of poverty, and they served their end.  In the least thing
as well as in the greatest, in every province of life as well as in her
novels, she displayed the same capacity of taking infinite pains, which
descended to her son.  When she was about forty (as near as her age was
known) she lost her voice; set herself at once to learn the piano,
working eight hours a day; and attained to such proficiency that her
collaboration in chamber music was courted by professionals.  And more
than twenty years later, the old lady might have been seen dauntlessly
beginning the study of Hebrew.  This is the more ethereal part of
courage; nor was she wanting in the more material.  Once when a
neighbouring groom, a married man, had seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin
mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance and horsewhipped the
man with her own hand.

How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the
young midshipman, is not very 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.

The marriage fell in evil days.  In 1823, the bubble of the Golden Aunt’s
inheritance had burst.  She died holding the hand of the nephew she had
so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down and seemed to bless
him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for when the will was opened,
there was not found so much as the mention of his name.  He was deeply in
debt; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell
a piece of land to clear himself.  ‘My dear boy,’ he said to Charles,
‘there will be nothing left for you.  I am a ruined man.’  And here
follows for me the strangest part of this story.  From the death of the
treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin, senior, had still some nine years to
live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and perhaps his
affairs were past restoration.  But his family at least had all this
while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew what they had to
look for at their father’s death; and yet when that happened in
September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting.  Poor John,
the days of his whips and spurs, and Yeomanry dinners, were quite over;
and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down
for the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a
peasant.  The mill farm at Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and
here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends
meet with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road
and not at all abashed at his employment.  In dress, voice, and manner,
he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least care for
appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment with the
present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic cheerfulness,
announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was yet well pleased to
go.  One would think there was little active virtue to be inherited from
such a race; and yet in this same voluntary peasant, the special gift of
Fleeming Jenkin was already half developed.  The old man to the end was
perpetually inventing; his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated
correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery receipts) of
pumps, road engines, steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam-threshing
machines; and I have it on Fleeming’s word that what he did was full of
ingenuity—only, as if by some cross destiny, useless.  These
disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but
rejoiced with a particular relish over his nephew’s success in the same
field.  ‘I glory in the professor,’ he wrote to his brother; and to
Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, ‘I was much pleased
with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with Conisure’s’
(connoisseur’s, _quasi_ amateur’s) ‘engineering?  Oh, what
presumption!—either of you or _my_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.

It followed from John’s inertia, that the duty of winding up the estate
fell into the hands of Charles.  He managed it with no more skill than
might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare livelihood for John
and nothing for the rest.  Eight months later, he married Miss Jackson;
and with her money, bought in some two-thirds of Stowting.  In the
beginning of the little family history which I have been following to so
great an extent, the Captain mentions, with a delightful pride: ‘A Court
Baron and Court Leet are regularly held by the Lady of the Manor, Mrs.
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin’; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his
wife, was the most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was
heavily encumbered and paid them nothing till some years before their
death.  In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild sons,
an indulgent mother and the impending emancipation of the slaves, was
moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of two doomed and declining
houses, the subject of this memoir was born, heir to an estate and to no
money, yet with inherited qualities that were to make him known and
loved.

CHAPTER II.  1833–1851.

Birth and Childhood—Edinburgh—Frankfort-on-the-Main—Paris—The Revolution
of 1848—The Insurrection—Flight to Italy—Sympathy with Italy—The
Insurrection in Genoa—A Student in Genoa—The Lad and his Mother.

HENRY CHARLES FLEEMING JENKIN (Fleeming, pronounced Flemming, to his
friends and family) was born in a Government building on the coast of
Kent, near Dungeness, where his father was serving at the time in the
Coastguard, on March 25, 1833, and named after Admiral Fleeming, one of
his father’s protectors in the navy.

His childhood was vagrant like his life.  Once he was left in the care of
his grandmother Jackson, while Mrs. Jenkin sailed in her husband’s ship
and stayed a year at the Havannah.  The tragic woman was besides from
time to time a member of the family she was in distress of mind and
reduced in fortune by the misconduct of her sons; her destitution and
solitude made it a recurring duty to receive her, her violence
continually enforced fresh separations.  In her passion of a disappointed
mother, she was a fit object of pity; but her grandson, who heard her
load his own mother with cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her
an indignant and impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later
life.  It is strange from this point of view to see his childish letters
to Mrs. Jackson; and to think that a man, distinguished above all by
stubborn truthfulness, should have been brought up to such dissimulation.
But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did no harm to Jenkin; and
whether he got harm or benefit from a so early acquaintance with violent
and hateful scenes, is more than I can guess.  The experience, at least,
was formative; and in judging his character it should not be forgotten.
But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in their gates; the Captain’s
sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, lived with them until her death; she had all
the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though she was unhappily deformed in
body and of frail health; and she even excelled her gentle and
ineffectual family in all amiable qualities.  So that each of the two
races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by his very cradle; the
one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and the life-long war in his
members had begun thus early by a victory for what was best.

We can trace the family from one country place to another in the south of
Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by riding home the
pony from the moors.  Before he was nine he could write such a passage as
this about a Hallowe’en observance: ‘I pulled a middling-sized
cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it.  No witches would run
after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away
together very comfortably to the end of their lives, and when mamma put
hers in which were meant for herself and papa they blazed away in the
like manner.’  Before he was ten he could write, with a really irritating
precocity, that he had been ‘making some pictures from a book called “Les
Français peints par 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.

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.

The family removed in 1847 to Paris, where Fleeming was put to school
under one Deluc.  There he learned French, and (if the captain is right)
first began to show a taste for mathematics.  But a far more important
teacher than Deluc was at hand; the year 1848, so momentous for Europe,
was momentous also for Fleeming’s character.  The family politics were
Liberal; Mrs. Jenkin, generous before all things, was sure to be upon the
side of exiles; and in the house of a Paris friend of hers, Mrs.
Turner—already known to fame as Shelley’s Cornelia de Boinville—Fleeming
saw and heard such men as Manin, Gioberti, and the Ruffinis.  He was thus
prepared to sympathise with revolution; and when the hour came, and he
found himself in the midst of stirring and influential events, the lad’s
whole character was moved.  He corresponded at that time with a young
Edinburgh friend, one Frank Scott; and I am here going to draw somewhat
largely on this boyish correspondence.  It gives us at once a picture of
the Revolution and a portrait of Jenkin at fifteen; not so different (his
friends will think) from the Jenkin of the end—boyish, simple,
opinionated, delighting in action, delighting before all things in any
generous sentiment.

                                                       ‘February 23, 1848.

    ‘When at 7 o’clock to-day I went out, I met a large band going round
    the streets, calling on the inhabitants to illuminate their houses,
    and bearing torches.  This was all very good fun, and everybody was
    delighted; but as they stopped rather long and were rather turbulent
    in the Place de la Madeleine, near where we live’ [in the Rue
    Caumartin] ‘a squadron of dragoons came up, formed, and charged at a
    hand-gallop.  This was a very pretty sight; the crowd was not too
    thick, so they easily got away; and the dragoons only gave blows with
    the back of the sword, which hurt but did not wound.  I was as close
    to them as I am now to the other side of the table; it was rather
    impressive, however.  At the second charge they rode on the pavement
    and knocked the torches out of the fellows’ hands; rather a shame,
    too—wouldn’t be stood in England. . . .

    [At] ‘ten minutes to ten . . . I went a long way along the
    Boulevards, passing by the office of Foreign Affairs, where Guizot
    lives, and where to-night there were about a thousand troops
    protecting him from the fury of the populace.  After this was passed,
    the number of the people thickened, till about half a mile further
    on, I met a troop of vagabonds, the wildest vagabonds in the
    world—Paris vagabonds, well armed, having probably broken into
    gunsmiths’ shops and taken the guns and swords.  They were about a
    hundred.  These were followed by about a thousand (I am rather
    diminishing than exaggerating numbers all through), indifferently
    armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc.  An uncountable troop of
    gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers’ wives (Paris women dare anything),
    ladies’ maids, common women—in fact, a crowd of all classes, though
    by far the greater number were of the better dressed class—followed.
    Indeed, it was a splendid sight: the mob in front chanting the
    “_Marseillaise_,” the national war hymn, grave and powerful,
    sweetened by the night air—though night in these splendid streets was
    turned into day, every window was filled with lamps, dim torches were
    tossing in the crowd . . . for Guizot has late this night given in
    his resignation, and this was an improvised illumination.

    ‘I and my father had turned with the crowd, and were close behind the
    second troop of vagabonds.  Joy was on every face.  I remarked to
    papa that “I would not have missed the scene for anything, I might
    never see such a splendid one,” when _plong_ went one shot—every face
    went pale—_r-r-r-r-r_ went the whole detachment, [and] the whole
    crowd of gentlemen and ladies turned and cut.  Such a scene!—ladies,
    gentlemen, and vagabonds went sprawling in the mud, not shot but
    tripped up; and those that went down could not rise, they were
    trampled over. . . . I ran a short time straight on and did not fall,
    then turned down a side street, ran fifty yards and felt tolerably
    safe; looked for papa, did not see him; so walked on quickly, giving
    the news as I went.’  [It appears, from another letter, the boy was
    the first to carry word of the firing to the Rue St. Honoré; and that
    his news wherever he brought it was received with hurrahs.  It was an
    odd entrance upon life for a little English lad, thus to play the
    part of rumour in such a crisis of the history of France.]

    ‘But now a new fear came over me.  I had little doubt but my papa was
    safe, but my fear was that he should arrive at home before me and
    tell the story; in that case I knew my mamma would go half mad with
    fright, so on I went as quick as possible.  I heard no more
    discharges.  When I got half way home, I found my way blocked up by
    troops.  That way or the Boulevards I must pass.  In the Boulevards
    they were fighting, and I was afraid all other passages might be
    blocked up . . . and I should have to sleep in a hotel in that case,
    and then my mamma—however, after a long _détour_, I found a passage
    and ran home, and in our street joined papa.

    ‘. . . I’ll tell you to-morrow the other facts gathered from
    newspapers and papa. . . . 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.

                                                              ‘Monday, 24.

    ‘It was that fire raised the people.  There was fighting all through
    the night in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, on the Boulevards where
    they had been shot at, and at the Porte St. Denis.  At ten o’clock,
    they resigned the house of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (where the
    disastrous volley was fired) to the people, who immediately took
    possession of it.  I went to school, but [was] hardly there when the
    row in that quarter commenced.  Barricades began to be fixed.
    Everyone was very grave now; the _externes_ went away, but no one
    came to fetch me, so I had to stay.  No lessons could go on.  A troop
    of armed men took possession of the barricades, so it was supposed I
    should have to sleep there.  The revolters came and asked for arms,
    but Deluc (head-master) is a National Guard, and he said he had only
    his own and he wanted them; but he said he would not fire on them.
    Then they asked for wine, which he gave them.  They took good care
    not to get drunk, knowing they would not be able to fight.  They were
    very polite and behaved extremely well.

    ‘About 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.

    ‘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. . . . .

    ‘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.

    ‘Went out again up the Boulevards.  The house of the Minister of
    Foreign Affairs was filled with people and “_Hôtel du Peuple_”
    written on it; the Boulevards were barricaded with fine old trees
    that were cut down and stretched all across the road.  We went
    through a great many little streets, all strongly barricaded, and
    sentinels of the people at the principal of them.  The streets 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!  _Vive la Réforme_!”  This cry
    was responded to by all, and every one saluted him as he passed.  I
    do not know if he was mortally wounded.  That Third Legion has
    behaved splendidly.

    ‘I then returned, and shortly afterwards went out again to the garden
    of the Tuileries.  They were given up to the people and the palace
    was being sacked.  The people were firing blank 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
    _Goddam_ in the streets; but to-day, in civil war, when they might
    have put a bullet through our heads, I never was insulted once.

    ‘At present we have a provisional Government, consisting of Odion
    [_sic_] Barrot, Lamartine, Marast, and some others; among them a
    common workman, but very intelligent.  This is a triumph of
    liberty—rather!

    ‘Now then, Frank, what do you think of it?  I in a revolution and out
    all day.  Just think, what fun!  So it was at first, till I was fired
    at yesterday; but to-day I was not frightened, but it turned me sick
    at heart, I don’t know why.  There has been no great bloodshed,
    [though] I certainly have seen men’s blood several times.  But
    there’s something shocking to see a whole armed populace, though not
    furious, for not one single shop has been broken open, except the
    gunsmiths’ shops, and most of the arms will probably be taken back
    again.  For the French have no cupidity in their nature; they don’t
    like to steal—it is not in their nature.  I shall send this letter in
    a day or two, when I am sure the post will go again.  I know I have
    been a long time writing, but I hope you will find the matter of this
    letter interesting, as coming from a person resident on the spot;
    though probably you don’t take much interest in the French, but I can
    think, write, and speak on no other subject.

                                                                 ‘Feb. 25.

    ‘There is no more fighting, the people have conquered; but the
    barricades are still kept up, and the people are in arms, more than
    ever fearing some new act of treachery on the part of the ex-King.
    The fight where I was was the principal cause of the Revolution.  I
    was in little danger from the shot, for there was an immense crowd in
    front of me, though quite within gunshot.  [By another letter, a
    hundred yards from the troops.]  I wished I had stopped there.

    ‘The Paris streets are filled with the most extraordinary crowds of
    men, women and children, ladies and gentlemen.  Every person joyful.
    The bands of armed men are perfectly polite.  Mamma and aunt to-day
    walked through armed crowds alone, that were firing blank cartridges
    in all directions.  Every person made way with the greatest
    politeness, and one common man with a blouse, coming by accident
    against her immediately stopped to beg her pardon in the politest
    manner.  There are few drunken men.  The Tuileries is still being run
    over by the people; they only broke two things, a bust of Louis
    Philippe and one of Marshal Bugeaud, who fired on the people. . . . .

    ‘I have been out all day again to-day, and precious tired I am.  The
    Republican party seem the strongest, and are going about with red
    ribbons in their button-holes. . . . .

    ‘The title of “Mister” is abandoned; they say nothing but “Citizen,”
    and the people are shaking hands amazingly.  They have got to the top
    of the public monuments, and, mingling with bronze or stone statues,
    five or six make a sort of _tableau vivant_, the top man holding up
    the red flag of the Republic; and right well they do it, and very
    picturesque they look.  I think I shall put this letter in the post
    to-morrow as we got a letter to-night.

                                                            (On Envelope.)

    ‘M. Lamartine has now by his eloquence conquered the whole armed
    crowd of citizens threatening to kill him if he did not immediately
    proclaim the Republic and red flag.  He said he could not yield to
    the citizens of Paris alone, that the whole country must be
    consulted; that he chose the tricolour, for it had followed and
    accompanied the triumphs of France all over the world, and that the
    red flag had only been dipped in the blood of the citizens.  For
    sixty hours he has been quieting the people: he is at the head of
    everything.  Don’t be prejudiced, Frank, by what you see in the
    papers.  The French have acted nobly, splendidly; there has been no
    brutality, plundering, or stealing. . . .  I did not like the French
    before; but in this respect they are the finest people in the world.
    I am so glad to have been here.’

And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty and
order read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the reader
knows, it was but the first act of the piece.  The letters, vivid as they
are, written as they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement,
yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the profound effect
produced.  At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy’s mind
awoke.  He dated his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day
when he saw and heard Rachel recite the ‘_Marseillaise_’ at the Français,
the 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
‘_Mourir pour la Patrie_.’  But the letters, though they prepare the mind
for no such revolution in the boy’s tastes and feelings, are yet full of
entertaining traits.  Let the reader note Fleeming’s eagerness to
influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further
history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and
devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and
omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive ‘person resident on
the spot,’ who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture
of the household—father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna—all day in
the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off
alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the massacre.

They had all the gift of enjoying life’s texture as it comes; they were
all born optimists.  The name of liberty was honoured in that family, its
spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign friends
of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the Liberal
side.  Like Wordsworth, they beheld

    France standing on the top of golden hours
    And human nature seeming born again.

At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their element in
such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in its course,
moderate in its purpose.  For them,

    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven.

And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth) they
should have so specially disliked the consequence.

It came upon them by surprise.  Liberal friends of the precise right
shade of colour had assured them, in Mrs. Turner’s drawing-room, that all
was for the best; and they rose on 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.’

‘The Revolution,’ writes Fleeming to Frank Scott, ‘was quite delightful:
getting popped at and run at by horses, and giving sous for the wounded
into little boxes guarded by the raggedest, picturesquest,
delightfullest, sentinels; but the insurrection! ugh, I shudder to think
at [_sic_] it.’  He found it ‘not a bit of fun sitting boxed up in the
house four days almost. . . I was the only _gentleman_ to four ladies,
and didn’t they keep me in order!  I did not dare to show my face at a
window, for fear of catching a stray ball or being forced to enter the
National Guard; [for] they would have it I was a man full-grown, French,
and every way fit to fight.  And my mamma was as bad as any of them; she
that told me I was a coward last time if I stayed in the house a quarter
of an hour!  But I drew, examined the pistols, of which I found lots with
caps, powder, and ball, while sometimes murderous intentions of killing a
dozen insurgents and dying violently overpowered by numbers. . . . .’  We
may drop this sentence here: under the conduct of its boyish writer, it
was to reach no legitimate end.

Four days of such a discipline had cured the family of Paris; the same
year Fleeming was to write, in answer apparently to a question of Frank
Scott’s, ‘I could find no national game in France but revolutions’; and
the witticism was justified in their experience.  On the first possible
day, they applied for passports, and were advised to take the road to
Geneva.  It appears it was scarce safe to leave Paris for England.
Charles Reade, with keen dramatic gusto, had just smuggled himself out of
that city in the bottom of a cab.  English gold had been found on the
insurgents, the name of England was in evil odour; and it was thus—for
strategic reasons, so to speak—that Fleeming found himself on the way to
that Italy where he was to complete his education, and for which he
cherished to the end a special kindness.

It was in Genoa they settled; partly for the sake of the captain, who
might there find naval comrades; partly because of the Ruffinis, who had
been friends of Mrs. Jenkin in their time of exile and were now
considerable men at home; partly, in fine, with hopes that Fleeming might
attend the University; in preparation for which he was put at once to
school.  It was the year of Novara; Mazzini was in Rome; the dry bones of
Italy were moving; and for people of alert and liberal sympathies the
time was inspiriting.  What with exiles turned Ministers of State,
universities thrown open to Protestants, Fleeming himself the first
Protestant student in Genoa, and thus, as his mother writes, ‘a living
instance of the progress of liberal ideas’—it was little wonder if the
enthusiastic young woman and the clever boy were heart and soul upon the
side of Italy.  It should not be forgotten that they were both on their
first visit to that country; the mother still child enough ‘to be
delighted when she saw real monks’; and both mother and son thrilling
with the first sight of snowy Alps, the blue Mediterranean, and the
crowded port and the palaces of Genoa.  Nor was their zeal without
knowledge.  Ruffini, deputy for Genoa and soon to be head of the
University, was at their side; and by means of him the family appear to
have had access to much Italian society.  To the end, Fleeming professed
his admiration of the Piedmontese and his unalterable confidence in the
future of Italy under their conduct; for Victor Emanuel, Cavour, the
first La Marmora and Garibaldi, he had varying degrees of sympathy and
praise: perhaps highest for the King, whose good sense and temper filled
him with respect—perhaps least for Garibaldi, whom he loved but yet
mistrusted.

But this is to look forward: these were the days not of Victor Emanuel
but of Charles Albert; and it was on Charles Albert that mother and son
had now fixed their eyes as on the sword-bearer of Italy.  On Fleeming’s
sixteenth birthday, they were, the mother writes, ‘in great anxiety for
news from the army.  You can have no idea what it is to live in a country
where such a struggle is going on.  The interest is one that absorbs all
others.  We eat, drink, and sleep to the noise of drums and musketry.
You would enjoy and almost admire Fleeming’s enthusiasm and
earnestness—and, courage, I may say—for we are among the small minority
of English who side with the Italians.  The other day, at dinner at the
Consul’s, boy as he is, and in spite of my admonitions, Fleeming defended
the Italian cause, and so well that he “tripped up the heels of his
adversary” simply from being well-informed on the subject and honest.  He
is as true as steel, and for no one will he bend right or left. . . . .
Do not fancy him a Bobadil,’ she adds, ‘he is only a very true, candid
boy.  I am so glad he remains in all respects but information a great
child.’

If this letter is correctly dated, the cause was already lost and the
King had already abdicated when these lines were written.  No sooner did
the news reach Genoa, than there began ‘tumultuous movements’; and the
Jenkins’ received hints it would be wise to leave the city.  But they had
friends and interests; even the captain had English officers to keep him
company, for Lord Hardwicke’s ship, the _Vengeance_, lay in port; and
supposing the danger to be real, I cannot but suspect the whole family of
a divided purpose, prudence being possibly weaker than curiosity.  Stay,
at least, they did, and thus rounded their experience of the
revolutionary year.  On Sunday, April 1, Fleeming and the captain went
for a ramble beyond the walls, leaving Aunt Anna and Mrs. Jenkin to walk
on the bastions with some friends.  On the way back, this party turned
aside to rest in the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie.  ‘We had
remarked,’ writes Mrs. Jenkin, ‘the entire absence of sentinels on the
ramparts, and how the cannons were left in solitary state; and I had just
remarked “How quiet everything is!” when suddenly we heard the drums
begin to beat and distant shouts.  _Accustomed as we are_ to revolutions,
we never thought of being frightened.’  For all that, they resumed their
return home.  On the way they saw men running and vociferating, but
nothing to indicate a general disturbance, until, near the Duke’s palace,
they came upon and passed a shouting mob dragging along with it three
cannon.  It had scarcely passed before they heard ‘a rushing sound’; one
of the gentlemen thrust back the party of ladies under a shed, and the
mob passed again.  A fine-looking young man was in their hands; and Mrs.
Jenkin saw him with his mouth open as if he sought to speak, saw him
tossed from one to another like a ball, and then saw him no more.  ‘He
was dead a few instants after, but the crowd hid that terror from us.  My
knees shook under me and my sight left me.’  With this street tragedy,
the curtain rose upon their second revolution.

The attack on Spirito Santo, and the capitulation and departure of the
troops speedily followed.  Genoa was in the hands of the Republicans, and
now came a time when the English residents were in a position to pay some
return for hospitality received.  Nor were they backward.  Our Consul
(the same who had the benefit of correction from Fleeming) carried the
Intendente on board the _Vengeance_, escorting him through the streets,
getting along with him on board a shore boat, and when the insurgents
levelled their muskets, standing up and naming himself, ‘_Console
Inglese_.’  A friend of the Jenkins’, Captain Glynne, had a more painful,
if a less dramatic part.  One Colonel Nosozzo had been killed (I read)
while trying to prevent his own artillery from firing on the mob; but in
that hell’s 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 _Vengeance_.  The Jenkins also had their refugees, the family
of an _employé_ threatened by a decree.  ‘You should have seen me making
a Union Jack to nail over our door,’ writes Mrs. Jenkin.  ‘I never worked
so fast in my life.  Monday and Tuesday,’ she continues, ‘were tolerably
quiet, our hearts beating fast in the hope of La Marmora’s approach, the
streets barricaded, and none but foreigners and women allowed to leave
the city.’  On Wednesday, La Marmora came indeed, but in the ugly form of
a bombardment; and that evening the Jenkins sat without lights about
their drawing-room window, ‘watching the huge red flashes of the cannon’
from the Brigato and La Specula forts, and hearkening, not without some
awful pleasure, to the thunder of the cannonade.

Lord Hardwicke intervened between the rebels and La Marmora; and there
followed a troubled armistice, filled with the voice of panic.  Now the
_Vengeance_ was known to be cleared for action; now it was rumoured that
the galley slaves were to be let loose upon the town, and now that the
troops would enter it by storm.  Crowds, trusting in the Union Jack over
the Jenkins’ door, came to beg them to receive their linen and other
valuables; nor could their instances be refused; and in the midst of all
this bustle and alarm, piles of goods must be examined and long
inventories made.  At last the captain decided things had gone too far.
He himself apparently remained to watch over the linen; but at five
o’clock on the Sunday morning, Aunt Anna, Fleeming, and his mother were
rowed in a pour of rain on board an English merchantman, to suffer ‘nine
mortal hours of agonising suspense.’  With the end of that time, peace
was restored.  On Tuesday morning officers with white flags appeared on
the bastions; then, regiment by regiment, the troops marched in, two
hundred men sleeping on the ground floor of the Jenkins’ house, thirty
thousand in all entering the city, but without disturbance, old La
Marmora being a commander of a Roman sternness.

With the return of quiet, and the reopening of the universities, we
behold a new character, Signor Flaminio: the professors, it appears, made
no attempt upon the Jenkin; and thus readily italianised the Fleeming.
He came well recommended; for their friend Ruffini was then, or soon
after, raised to be the head of the University; and the professors were
very kind and attentive, possibly to Ruffini’s _protégé_, perhaps also to
the first Protestant student.  It was no joke for Signor Flaminio at
first; certificates had to be got from Paris and from Rector Williams;
the classics must be furbished up at home that he might follow Latin
lectures; examinations bristled in the path, the entrance examination
with Latin and English essay, and oral trials (much softened for the
foreigner) in Horace, Tacitus, and Cicero, and the first University
examination only three months later, in Italian eloquence, no less, and
other wider subjects.  On one point the first Protestant student was
moved to thank his stars: that there was no Greek required for the
degree.  Little did he think, as he set down his gratitude, how much, in
later life and among cribs and dictionaries, he was to lament this
circumstance; nor how much of that later life he was to spend acquiring,
with infinite toil, a shadow of what he might then have got with ease and
fully.  But if his Genoese education was in this particular imperfect, he
was fortunate in the branches that more immediately touched on his
career.  The physical laboratory was the best mounted in Italy.
Bancalari, the professor of natural philosophy, was famous in his day; by
what seems even an odd coincidence, he went deeply into 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.

In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is something, for the
period, girlish.  He was indeed his mother’s boy; and it was fortunate
his mother was not altogether feminine.  She gave her son a womanly
delicacy in morals, to a man’s taste—to his own taste in later life—too
finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than healthful.  She encouraged him
besides in drawing-room interests.  But in other points her influence was
manlike.  Filled with the spirit of thoroughness, she taught him to make
of the least of these accomplishments a virile task; and the teaching
lasted him through life.  Immersed as she was in the day’s movements and
buzzed about by leading Liberals, she handed on to him her creed in
politics: an enduring kindness for Italy, and a loyalty, like that of
many clever women, to the Liberal party with but small regard to men or
measures.  This attitude of mind used often to disappoint me in a man so
fond of logic; but I see now how it was learned from the bright eyes of
his mother and to the sound of the cannonades of 1848.  To some of her
defects, besides, she made him heir.  Kind as was the bond that united
her to her son, kind and even pretty, she was scarce a woman to adorn a
home; loving as she did to shine; careless as she was of domestic,
studious of public graces.  She probably rejoiced to see the boy grow up
in somewhat of the image of herself, generous, excessive, enthusiastic,
external; catching at ideas, brandishing them when caught; fiery for the
right, but always fiery; ready at fifteen to correct a consul, ready at
fifty to explain to any artist his own art.

The defects and advantages of such a training were obvious in Fleeming
throughout life.  His thoroughness was not that of the patient scholar,
but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate study; he had learned
too much from dogma, given indeed by cherished lips; and precocious as he
was in the use of the tools of the mind, he was truly backward in
knowledge of life and of himself.  Such as it was at least, his home and
school training was now complete; and you are to conceive the lad as
being formed in a household of meagre revenue, among foreign
surroundings, and under the influence of an imperious drawing-room queen;
from whom he learned a great refinement of morals, a strong sense of
duty, much forwardness of bearing, all manner of studious and artistic
interests, and many ready-made opinions which he embraced with a son’s
and a disciple’s loyalty.

CHAPTER III.  1851–1858.

Return to England—Fleeming at Fairbairn’s—Experience in a Strike—Dr. Bell
and Greek Architecture—The Gaskells—Fleeming at Greenwich—The
Austins—Fleeming and the Austins—His Engagement—Fleeming and Sir W.
Thomson.

IN 1851, the year of Aunt Anna’s death, the family left Genoa and came to
Manchester, where Fleeming was entered in Fairbairn’s works as an
apprentice.  From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue Mediterranean,
the humming lanes and the bright theatres of Genoa, he fell—and he was
sharply conscious of the fall—to the dim skies and the foul ways of
Manchester.  England he found on his return ‘a horrid place,’ and there
is no doubt the family found it a dear one.  The story of the Jenkin
finances is not easy to follow.  The family, I am told, did not practice
frugality, only lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who
was always complaining of ‘those dreadful bills,’ was ‘always a good deal
dressed.’  But at this time of the return to England, things must have
gone further.  A holiday tour of a fortnight, Fleeming feared would be
beyond what he could afford, and he only projected it ‘to have a castle
in the air.’  And there were actual pinches.  Fresh from a warmer sun, he
was obliged to go without a greatcoat, and learned on railway journeys to
supply the place of one with wrappings of old newspaper.

From half-past eight till six, he must ‘file and chip vigorously in a
moleskin suit and infernally dirty.’  The work was not new to him, for he
had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work
was without interest.  Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know
and do also.  ‘I never learned anything,’ he wrote, ‘not even standing on
my head, but I found a use for it.’  In the spare hours of his first
telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he meant
‘to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the ship and how to
handle her on any occasion’; and once when he was shown a young lady’s
holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, ‘It showed me my eyes
had been idle.’  Nor was his the case of the mere literary smatterer,
content if he but learn the names of things.  In him, to do and to do
well, was even a dearer ambition than to know.  Anything done well, any
craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him.  I remember him
with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly fitted that,
when one was driven home, the others started from their places; the whole
spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box; that plain piece
of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of perfection as the
happiest drawing or the finest bronze; and he who could not enjoy it in
the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the others.  Thus, too, he
found in Leonardo’s engineering and anatomical drawings a perpetual
feast; and of the former he spoke even with emotion.  Nothing indeed
annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to separate the fine arts from the
arts of handicraft; any definition or theory that failed to bring these
two together, according to him, had missed the point; and the essence of
the pleasure received lay in seeing things well done.  Other qualities
must be added; he was the last to deny that; but this, of perfect craft,
was at the bottom of all.  And on the other hand, a nail ill-driven, a
joint ill-fitted, a tracing clumsily done, anything to which a man had
set his hand and not set it aptly, moved him to shame and anger.  With
such a character, he would feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn’s.
There would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided,
and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file, as he
had practiced scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but resolute to
learn.

And there was another spring of delight.  For he was now moving daily
among those strange creations of man’s brain, to some so abhorrent, to
him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron, water, and fire are
made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more powerful than an
elephant’s, and now with a touch more precise and dainty than a
pianist’s.  The taste for machinery was one that I could never share with
him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness.  Once when I had
proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect, he looked at me
askance.  ‘And the best of the joke,’ said he, ‘is that he thinks himself
quite a poet.’  For to him the struggle of the engineer against brute
forces and with inert allies, was nobly poetic.  Habit never dulled in
him the sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his
profession.  Habit only sharpened his inventor’s gusto in contrivance, in
triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave
and to outstrip the tempest.  To the ignorant the great results alone are
admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in particular, rather the
infinite device and sleight of hand that made them possible.

A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn’s, a
pupil would never be popular unless he drank with the workmen and
imitated them in speech and manner.  Fleeming, who would do none of these
things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the subject
of remark in Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till to-day.  He
thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be brought into a
close relation with the working classes; and for the skilled artisan he
had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues, and his taste in
some of the arts.  But he knew the classes too well to regard them, like
a platform speaker, in a lump.  He drew, on the other hand, broad
distinctions; and it was his profound sense of the difference between one
working man and another that led him to devote so much time, in later
days, to the furtherance of technical education.  In 1852 he had occasion
to see both men and masters at their worst, in the excitement of a
strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both would seem to have
behaved.  Beginning with a fair show of justice on either side, the
masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy, and the men
disgraced their order by acts of outrage.  ‘On Wednesday last,’ writes
Fleeming, ‘about three thousand banded round Fairbairn’s door at 6
o’clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the lowest of
the low in a very low place.  Orders came that no one was to leave the
works; but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious
hungry and thought they would venture.  Two of my companions and myself
went out with the very first, and had the full benefit of every possible
groan and bad language.’  But the police cleared a lane through the
crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape unhurt, and only the Knobsticks
followed home and kicked with clogs; so that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may
say, for nothing, that fine thrill of expectant valour with which he had
sallied forth into the mob.  ‘I never before felt myself so decidedly
somebody, instead of nobody,’ he wrote.

Outside as inside the works, he was ‘pretty merry and well to do,’
zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-kindness
to his mother.  For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell,
‘working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek
architectural proportions’: a business after Fleeming’s heart, for he was
never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and
science.  This was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love
and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the
greatest, from the _Agamemnon_ (perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to
the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to express in his
familiar phrase: ‘The Greeks were the boys.’  Dr. Bell—the son of George
Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and though he made less use of it than
some, a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race—had hit upon the
singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave the proportions
of the Doric order.  Fleeming, under Dr. Bell’s direction, applied the
same method to the other orders, and again found the proportions
accurately given.  Numbers of diagrams were prepared; but the discovery
was never given to the world, perhaps because of the dissensions that
arose between the authors.  For Dr. Bell believed that ‘these
intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of, the
antagonistic forces at work’; but his pupil and helper, with
characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted
the discovery as ‘a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as
might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical and in no way
connected with any laws of either force or beauty.’  ‘Many a hard and
pleasant fight we had over it,’ wrote Jenkin, in later years; ‘and
impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the
arguments of the master.’  I do not know about the antagonistic forces in
the Doric order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of
these affairs with Dr. Bell was still, like the corrector of Italian
consuls, ‘a great child in everything but information.’  At the house of
Colonel Cleather, he might be seen with a family of children; and with
these, there was no word of the Greek orders; with these Fleeming was
only an uproarious boy and an entertaining draughtsman; so that his
coming was the signal for the young people to troop into the playroom,
where sometimes the roof rang with romping, and sometimes they gathered
quietly about him as he amused them with his pencil.

In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my
readers—that of the Gaskells, Fleeming was a frequent visitor.  To Mrs.
Gaskell, he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his
later friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember.  With
the girls, he had ‘constant fierce wrangles,’ forcing them to reason out
their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss
Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his
character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish devotion
to his parents.  Of one of these wrangles, I have found a record most
characteristic of the man.  Fleeming had been laying down his doctrine
that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right ‘to boast of
your six men-servants to a burglar or to steal a knife to prevent a
murder’; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what is current,
had rejected the heresy with indignation.  From such passages-at-arms,
many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the
house than he fell into delighted admiration of the spirit of his
adversaries.  From that it was but a step to ask himself ‘what truth was
sticking in their heads’; for even the falsest form of words (in
Fleeming’s life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as he could
‘not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire what is
pretty in the ugly thing.’  And before he sat down to write his letter,
he thought he had hit upon the explanation.  ‘I fancy the true idea,’ he
wrote, ‘is that you must never do yourself or anyone else a moral
injury—make any man a thief or a liar—for any end’; quite a different
thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never stealing or lying.
But this perfervid disputant was not always out of key with his audience.
One whom he met in the same house announced that she would never again be
happy.  ‘What does that signify?’ cried Fleeming.  ‘We are not here to be
happy, but to be good.’  And the words (as his hearer writes to me)
became to her a sort of motto during life.

From Fairbairn’s and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in
Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn’s at Greenwich, where he was
engaged as draughtsman.  There in 1856, we find him in ‘a terribly busy
state, finishing up engines for innumerable gun-boats and steam frigates
for the ensuing campaign.’  From half-past eight in the morning till nine
or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial
comrades, ‘saluted by chaff, generally low personal and not witty,’
pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking
to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be
as little like himself as possible.  His lodgings were hard by, ‘across a
dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses’;
he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by
himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several
ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to correspond.  But
not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who had
made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings,
unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical.  ‘Sunday,’
says he, ‘I generally visit some friends in town and seem to swim in
clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get back.
Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.’  It
is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to stand it
without loss.  ‘We are not here to be happy, but to be good,’ quoth the
young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for happiness than
Fleeming Jenkin.  There is a time of life besides when apart from
circumstances, few men are agreeable to their neighbours and still fewer
to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had arrived, later
than common and even worse provided.  The letter from which I have quoted
is the last of his correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last
confidential letter to one of his own sex.  ‘If you consider it rightly,’
he wrote long after, ‘you will find the want of correspondence no such
strange want in men’s friendships.  There is, believe me, something noble
in the metal which does not rust though not burnished by daily use.’  It
is well said; but the last letter to Frank Scott is scarcely of a noble
metal.  It is plain the writer has outgrown his old self, yet not made
acquaintance with the new.  This letter from a busy youth of three and
twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and
shame, the expense of hope _in vacuo_, the lack of friends, the longing
after love; the whole world of egoism under which youth stands groaning,
a voluntary Atlas.

With Fleeming this disease was never seemingly severe.  The very day
before this (to me) distasteful letter, he had written to Miss Bell of
Manchester in a sweeter strain; I do not quote the one, I quote the
other; fair things are the best.  ‘I keep my own little lodgings,’ he
writes, ‘but come up every night to see mamma’ (who was then on a visit
to London) ‘if not kept too late at the works; and have singing lessons
once more, and sing “_Donne l’amore è scaltro pargoletto_”; and think and
talk about you; and listen to mamma’s projects _de_ Stowting.  Everything
turns to gold at her touch, she’s a fairy and no mistake.  We go on
talking till I have a picture in my head, and can hardly believe at the
end that the original is Stowting.  Even you don’t know half how good
mamma is; in other things too, which I must not mention.  She teaches me
how it is not necessary to be very rich to do much good.  I begin to
understand that mamma would find useful occupation and create beauty at
the bottom of a volcano.  She has little weaknesses, but is a real
generous-hearted woman, which I suppose is the finest thing in the
world.’  Though neither mother nor son could be called beautiful, they
make a pretty picture; the ugly, generous, ardent woman weaving rainbow
illusions; the ugly, clear-sighted, loving son sitting at her side in one
of his rare hours of pleasure, half-beguiled, half-amused, wholly
admiring, as he listens.  But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures
fade, and Stowting is once more burthened with debt, and the noisy
companions and the long hours of drudgery once more approach, no wonder
if the dirty green seems all the dirtier or if Atlas must resume his
load.

But in healthy natures, this time of moral teething passes quickly of
itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh interests; and already, in the
letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of hope: his friends in
London, his love for his profession.  The last might have saved him; for
he was ere long to pass into a new sphere, where all his faculties were
to be tried and exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and
effort.  But it was not left to engineering: another and more influential
aim was to be set before him.  He must, in any case, have fallen in love;
in any case, his love would have ruled his life; and the question of
choice was, for the descendant of two such families, a thing of paramount
importance.  Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as he was,
the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have been led
far astray.  By one of those partialities that fill men at once with
gratitude and wonder, his choosing was directed well.  Or are we to say
that by a man’s choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he deserves
his fortune?  One thing at least reason may discern: that a man but
partly chooses, he also partly forms, his help-mate; and he must in part
deserve her, or the treasure is but won for a moment to be lost.
Fleeming chanced if you will (and indeed all these opportunities are as
‘random as blind man’s buff’) upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he
had the wit to know it, the courage to wait and labour for his prize, and
the tenderness and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes
precious.  Upon this point he has himself written well, as usual with
fervent optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase) with a truth sticking
in his head.

‘Love,’ he wrote, ‘is not an intuition of the person most suitable to us,
most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears
fruit.  If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be
small indeed; our intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would
then be fatal as it is proverbial.  No, love works differently, and in
its blindness lies its strength.  Man and woman, each strongly desires to
be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations which
they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the other,
tries to fulfil that ideal, each partially succeeds.  The greater the
love, the greater the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more
durable, the more beautiful the effect.  Meanwhile the blindness of each
to the other’s defects enables the transformation to proceed
[unobserved,] so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it ever is, and this
I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred in the person
whom they loved.  Do not fear, therefore.  I do not tell you that your
friend will not change, but as I am sure that her choice cannot be that
of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe and a
good one.  Do not fear that anything you love will vanish, he must love
it too.’

Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a letter from
Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins.  This was a family certain to
interest a thoughtful young man.  Alfred, the youngest and least known of
the Austins, had been a beautiful golden-haired child, petted and kept
out of the way of both sport and study by a partial mother.  Bred an
attorney, he had (like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and
was called to the bar when past thirty.  A Commission of Enquiry into the
state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his
true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at
Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato
famine and the Irish immigration of the ‘forties, and finally in London,
where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera.  He
was then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty’s Office
of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled with perfect
competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his retirement, in
1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath.  While apprentice to a Norwich
attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent visitor in the house of Mr.
Barron, a rallying place in those days of intellectual society.  Edward
Barron, the son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough, was
a man typical of the time.  When he was a child, he had once been patted
on the head in his father’s shop by no less a man than Samuel Johnson, as
the Doctor went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale; and the
child was true to this early consecration.  ‘A life of lettered ease
spent in provincial retirement,’ it is thus that the biographer of that
remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the phrase is
equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron.  The pair were close
friends, ‘W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,’ writes Barron in
his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had moved to London and
Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers, the latter
wrote: ‘To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you please, that I miss him
more than I regret him—that I acquiesce in his retirement from Norwich,
because I could ill brook his observation of my increasing debility of
mind.’  This chosen companion of William Taylor must himself have been no
ordinary man; and he was the friend besides of Borrow, whom I find him
helping in his Latin.  But he had no desire for popular distinction,
lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield of Enfield’s
_Speaker_, and devoted his time to the education of his family, in a
deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits of stoicism,
that would surprise a modern.  From these children we must single out his
youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under his care to be a sound Latin,
an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without outward sign after
the manner of the Godwin school.  This was the more notable, as the girl
really derived from the Enfields; whose high-flown romantic temper, I
wish I could find space to illustrate.  She was but seven years old, when
Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her; and the union thus
early prepared was singularly full.  Where the husband and wife differed,
and they did so on momentous subjects, they differed with perfect temper
and content; and in the conduct of life, and in depth and durability of
love, they were at one.  Each full of high spirits, each practised
something of the same repression: no sharp word was uttered in their
house.  The same point of honour ruled them, a guest was sacred and stood
within the pale from criticism.  It was a house, besides, of unusual
intellectual tension.  Mrs. Austin remembered, in the early days of the
marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and Alfred, marching to and
fro, each with his hands behind his back, and ‘reasoning high’ till
morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would cheer their speculations
with as many as fifteen cups of tea.  And though, before the date of
Fleeming’s visit, the brothers were separated, Charles long ago retired
from the world at Brandeston, and John already near his end in the
‘rambling old house’ at Weybridge, Alfred Austin and his wife were still
a centre of much intellectual society, and still, as indeed they remained
until the last, youthfully alert in mind.  There was but one child of the
marriage, Anne, and she was herself something new for the eyes of the
young visitor; brought up, as she had been, like her mother before her,
to the standard of a man’s acquirements.  Only one art had she been
denied, she must not learn the violin—the thought was too monstrous even
for the Austins; and indeed it would seem as if that tide of reform which
we may date from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft had in some degree even
receded; for though Miss Austin was suffered to learn Greek, the
accomplishment was kept secret like a piece of guilt.  But whether this
stealth was caused by a backward movement in public thought since the
time of Edward Barron, or by the change from enlightened Norwich to
barbarian London, I have no means of judging.

When Fleeming presented his letter, he fell in love at first sight with
Mrs. Austin and the life, and atmosphere of the house.  There was in the
society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to the world,
something gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity, something
unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that could not fail to
hit the fancy of this hot-brained boy.  The unbroken enamel of courtesy,
the self-restraint, the dignified kindness of these married folk, had
besides a particular attraction for their visitor.  He could not but
compare what he saw, with what he knew of his mother and himself.
Whatever virtues Fleeming possessed, he could never count on being civil;
whatever brave, true-hearted qualities he was able to admire in Mrs.
Jenkin, mildness of demeanour was not one of them.  And here he found per
sons who were the equals of his mother and himself in intellect and width
of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity of
disposition.  Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he always loved it.  He
went away from that house struck through with admiration, and vowing to
himself that his own married life should be upon that pattern, his wife
(whoever she might be) like Eliza Barron, himself such another husband as
Alfred Austin.  What is more strange, he not only brought away, but left
behind him, golden opinions.  He must have been—he was, I am told—a
trying lad; but there shone out of him such a light of innocent candour,
enthusiasm, intelligence, and appreciation, that to persons already some
way forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently the perennial
comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful.  By a pleasant
coincidence, there was one person in the house whom he did not appreciate
and who did not appreciate him: Anne Austin, his future wife.  His boyish
vanity ruffled her; his appearance, never impressive, was then, by reason
of obtrusive boyishness, still less so; she found occasion to put him in
the wrong by correcting a false quantity; and when Mr. Austin, after
doing his visitor the almost unheard-of honour of accompanying him to the
door, announced ‘That was what young men were like in my time’—she could
only reply, looking on her handsome father, ‘I thought they had been
better looking.’

This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it was
some time before Fleeming began to know his mind; and yet longer ere he
ventured to show it.  The corrected quantity, to those who knew him well,
will seem to have played its part; he was the man always to reflect over
a correction and to admire the castigator.  And fall in love he did; not
hurriedly but step by step, not blindly but with critical discrimination;
not in the fashion of Romeo, but before he was done, with all Romeo’s
ardour and more than Romeo’s faith.  The high favour to which he
presently rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife, might well
give him ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present and the
obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when his
aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps for the
only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence.  There was indeed opening
before him a wide door of hope.  He had changed into the service of
Messrs. Liddell & Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in the new
field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to face with
his life’s work.  That impotent sense of his own value, as of a ship
aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began to fall from him.
New problems which he was endowed to solve, vistas of new enquiry which
he was fitted to explore, opened before him continually.  His gifts had
found their avenue and goal.  And with this pleasure of effective
exercise, there must have sprung up at once the hope of what is called by
the world success.  But from these low beginnings, it was a far look
upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always more than
problematical to any lover; the consent of parents must be always more
than doubtful to a young man with a small salary and no capital except
capacity and hope.  But Fleeming was not the lad to lose any good thing
for the lack of trial; and at length, in the autumn of 1857, this
boyish-sized, boyish-mannered, and superlatively ill-dressed young
engineer, entered the house of the Austins, with such sinkings as we may
fancy, and asked leave to pay his addresses to the daughter.  Mrs. Austin
already loved him like a son, she was but too glad to give him her
consent; Mr. Austin reserved the right to inquire into his character;
from neither was there a word about his prospects, by neither was his
income mentioned.  ‘Are these people,’ he wrote, struck with wonder at
this dignified disinterestedness, ‘are these people the same as other
people?’  It was not till he was armed with this permission, that Miss
Austin even suspected the nature of his hopes: so strong, in this
unmannerly boy, was the principle of true courtesy; so powerful, in this
impetuous nature, the springs of self-repression.  And yet a boy he was;
a boy in heart and mind; and it was with a boy’s chivalry and frankness
that he won his wife.  His conduct was a model of honour, hardly of tact;
to conceal love from the loved one, to court her parents, to be silent
and discreet till these are won, and then without preparation to approach
the lady—these are not arts that I would recommend for imitation.  They
lead to final refusal.  Nothing saved Fleeming from that fate, but one
circumstance that cannot be counted upon—the hearty favour of the mother,
and one gift that is inimitable and that never failed him throughout
life, the gift of a nature essentially noble and outspoken.  A happy and
high-minded anger flashed through his despair: it won for him his wife.

Nearly two years passed before it was possible to marry: two years of
activity, now in London; now at Birkenhead, fitting out ships, inventing
new machinery for new purposes, and dipping into electrical experiment;
now in the _Elba_ on his first telegraph cruise between Sardinia and
Algiers: a busy and delightful period of bounding ardour, incessant toil,
growing hope and fresh interests, with behind and through all, the image
of his beloved.  A few extracts from his correspondence with his
betrothed will give the note of these truly joyous years.  ‘My profession
gives me all the excitement and interest I ever hope for, but the sorry
jade is obviously jealous of you.’—‘“Poor Fleeming,” in spite of wet,
cold and wind, clambering over moist, tarry slips, wandering among pools
of slush in waste places inhabited by wandering locomotives, grows
visibly stronger, has dismissed his office cough and cured his
toothache.’—‘The whole of the paying out and lifting machinery must be
designed and ordered in two or three days, and I am half crazy with work.
I like it though: it’s like a good ball, the excitement carries you
through.’—‘I was running to and from the ships and warehouse through
fierce gusts of rain and wind till near eleven, and you cannot think what
a pleasure it was to be blown about and think of you in your pretty
dress.’—‘I am at the works till ten and sometimes till eleven.  But I
have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass
scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments
to make, and enjoy myself amazingly.  I find the study of electricity so
entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work.’  And for a last
taste, ‘Yesterday I had some charming electrical experiments.  What shall
I compare them to—a new song? a Greek play?’

It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of Professor,
now Sir William, Thomson.  To describe the part played by these two in
each other’s lives would lie out of my way.  They worked together on the
Committee on Electrical Standards; they served together at the laying
down or the repair of many deep-sea cables; and Sir William was regarded
by Fleeming, not only with the ‘worship’ (the word is his own) due to
great scientific gifts, but with an ardour of personal friendship not
frequently excelled.  To their association, Fleeming brought the valuable
element of a practical understanding; but he never thought or spoke of
himself where Sir William was in question; and I recall quite in his last
days, a singular instance of this modest loyalty to one whom he admired
and loved.  He drew up a paper, in a quite personal interest, of his own
services; yet even here he must step out of his way, he must add, where
it had no claim to be added, his opinion that, in their joint work, the
contributions of Sir William had been always greatly the most valuable.
Again, I shall not readily forget with what emotion he once told me an
incident of their associated travels.  On one of the mountain ledges of
Madeira, Fleeming’s pony bolted between Sir William. and the precipice
above; by strange good fortune and thanks to the steadiness of Sir
William’s horse, no harm was done; but for the moment, Fleeming saw his
friend hurled into the sea, and almost by his own act: it was a memory
that haunted him.

CHAPTER IV.  1859–1868.

Fleeming’s Marriage—His Married Life—Professional Difficulties—Life at
Claygate—Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin; and of Fleeming—Appointment to the
Chair at Edinburgh.

ON Saturday, Feb. 26, 1859, profiting by a holiday of four days, Fleeming
was married to Miss Austin at Northiam: a place connected not only with
his own family but with that of his bride as well.  By Tuesday morning,
he was at work again, fitting out cableships at Birkenhead.  Of the walk
from his lodgings to the works, I find a graphic sketch in one of his
letters: ‘Out over the railway bridge, along a wide road raised to the
level of a ground floor above the land, which, not being built upon,
harbours puddles, ponds, pigs, and Irish hovels;—so to the dock
warehouses, four huge piles of building with no windows, surrounded by a
wall about twelve feet high—in through the large gates, round which hang
twenty or thirty rusty Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting for
employment;—on along the railway, which came in at the same gates and
which branches down between each vast block—past a pilot-engine butting
refractory trucks into their places—on to the last block, [and] down the
branch, sniffing the guano-scented air and detecting the old bones.  The
hartshorn flavour of the guano becomes very strong, as I near the docks
where, across the _Elba’s_ decks, a huge vessel is discharging her cargo
of the brown dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that same
cargo for the last five months.’  This was the walk he took his young
wife on the morrow of his return.  She had been used to the society of
lawyers and civil servants, moving in that circle which seems to itself
the pivot of the nation and is in truth only a clique like another; and
Fleeming was to her the nameless assistant of a nameless firm of
engineers, doing his inglorious business, as she now saw for herself,
among unsavoury surroundings.  But when their walk brought them within
view of the river, she beheld a sight to her of the most novel beauty:
four great, sea-going ships dressed out with flags.  ‘How lovely!’ she
cried.  ‘What is it for?’—‘For you,’ said Fleeming.  Her surprise was
only equalled by her pleasure.  But perhaps, for what we may call private
fame, there is no life like that of the engineer; who is a great man in
out-of-the-way places, by the dockside or on the desert island or in
populous ships, and remains quite unheard of in the coteries of London.
And Fleeming had already made his mark among the few who had an
opportunity of knowing him.

His marriage was the one decisive incident of his career; from that
moment until the day of his death, he had one thought to which all the
rest were tributary, the thought of his wife.  No one could know him even
slightly, and not remark the absorbing greatness of that sentiment; nor
can any picture of the man be drawn that does not in proportion dwell
upon it.  This is a delicate task; but if we are to leave behind us (as
we wish) some presentment of the friend we have lost, it is a task that
must be undertaken.

For all his play of mind and fancy, for all his indulgence—and, as time
went on, he grew indulgent—Fleeming had views of duty that were even
stern.  He was too shrewd a student of his fellow-men to remain long
content with rigid formulæ of conduct.  Iron-bound, impersonal ethics,
the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the
deification of averages.  ‘As to Miss (I declare I forget her name) being
bad,’ I find him writing, ‘people only mean that she has broken the
Decalogue—which is not at all the same thing.  People who have kept in
the high-road of Life really have less opportunity for taking a
comprehensive view of it than those who have leaped over the hedges and
strayed up the hills; not but what the hedges are very necessary, and our
stray travellers often have a weary time of it.  So, you may say, have
those in the dusty roads.’  Yet he was himself a very stern respecter of
the hedgerows; sought safety and found dignity in the obvious path of
conduct; and would palter with no simple and recognised duty of his
epoch.  Of marriage in particular, of the bond so formed, of the
obligations incurred, of the debt men owe to their children, he conceived
in a truly antique spirit: not to blame others, but to constrain himself.
It was not to blame, I repeat, that he held these views; for others, he
could make a large allowance; and yet he tacitly expected of his friends
and his wife a high standard of behaviour.  Nor was it always easy to
wear the armour of that ideal.

Acting upon these beliefs; conceiving that he had indeed ‘given himself’
(in the full meaning of these words) for better, for worse; painfully
alive to his defects of temper and deficiency in charm; resolute to make
up for these; thinking last of himself: Fleeming was in some ways the
very man to have made a noble, uphill fight of an unfortunate marriage.
In other ways, it is true he was one of the most unfit for such a trial.
And it was his beautiful destiny to remain to the last hour the same
absolute and romantic lover, who had shown to his new bride the
flag-draped vessels in the Mersey.  No fate is altogether easy; but
trials are our touchstone, trials overcome our reward; and it was given
to Fleeming to conquer.  It was given to him to live for another, not as
a task, but till the end as an enchanting pleasure.  ‘People may write
novels,’ he wrote in 1869, ‘and other people may write poems, but not a
man or woman among them can write to say how happy a man may be, who is
desperately in love with his wife after ten years of marriage.’  And
again in 1885, after more than twenty-six years of marriage, and within
but five weeks of his death: ‘Your first letter from Bournemouth,’ he
wrote, ‘gives me heavenly pleasure—for which I thank Heaven and you
too—who are my heaven on earth.’  The mind hesitates whether to say that
such a man has been more good or more fortunate.

Any woman (it is the defect of her sex) comes sooner to the stable mind
of maturity than any man; and Jenkin was to the end of a most deliberate
growth.  In the next chapter, when I come to deal with his telegraphic
voyages and give some taste of his correspondence, the reader will still
find him at twenty-five an arrant 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.

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.’

This cottage at Claygate stood just without the village, well surrounded
with trees and commanding a pleasant view.  A piece of the garden was
turfed over to form a croquet green, and Fleeming became (I need scarce
say) a very ardent player.  He grew ardent, too, in gardening.  This he
took up at first to please his wife, having no natural inclination; but
he had no sooner set his hand to it, than, like everything else he
touched, it became with him a passion.  He budded roses, he potted
cuttings in the coach-house; if there came a change of weather at night,
he would rise out of bed to protect his favourites; when he was thrown
with a dull companion, it was enough for him to discover in the man a
fellow gardener; on his travels, he would go out of his way to visit
nurseries and gather hints; and to the end of his life, after other
occupations prevented him putting his own hand to the spade, he drew up a
yearly programme for his gardener, in which all details were regulated.
He had begun by this time to write.  His paper on Darwin, which had the
merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been
written before this in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at
Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of
‘_Fecundity_, _Fertility_, _Sterility_, _and Allied Topics_,’ which Dr.
Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of
the work.  The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most
incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review
borrowed and reprinted by Matthews Duncan are compliments of a rare
strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been precious indeed.
There was yet a third of the same kind in store for him; and when Munro
himself owned that he had found instruction in the paper on Lucretius, we
may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the capitol of reviewing.

Croquet, charades, Christmas magic lanterns for the village children, an
amateur concert or a review article in the evening; plenty of hard work
by day; regular visits to meetings of the British Association, from one
of which I find him characteristically writing: ‘I cannot say that I have
had any amusement yet, but I am enjoying the dulness and dry bustle of
the whole thing’; occasional visits abroad on business, when he would
find the time to glean (as I have said) gardening hints for himself, and
old folk-songs or new fashions of dress for his wife; and the continual
study and care of his children: these were the chief elements of his
life.  Nor were friends wanting.  Captain and Mrs. Jenkin, Mr. and Mrs.
Austin, Clerk Maxwell, Miss Bell of Manchester, and others came to them