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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume
+9, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Other: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: December 4, 2009 [EBook #30598]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF R.L. STEVENSON, VOL. 9 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Marius Borror and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note: Hyphenation inconsistencies were left unchanged.
+
+
+
+
+               THE WORKS OF
+
+          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+             SWANSTON EDITION
+
+                VOLUME IX
+
+
+  _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
+  Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
+  STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
+  have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
+  Copies are for sale._
+
+         _This is No._ ........
+
+
+  [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF NOTE FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF R. L. S.
+  [_See also overleaf._]]
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+             THE WORKS OF
+
+             ROBERT LOUIS
+
+               STEVENSON
+
+              VOLUME NINE
+
+
+  LONDON : PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
+  WINDUS : IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
+  AND COMPANY LIMITED : WILLIAM
+  HEINEMANN : AND LONGMANS GREEN
+  AND COMPANY              MDCCCCXI
+
+
+
+
+         ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
+
+                                              PAGE
+     I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME                    7
+
+    II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES                   19
+
+   III. OLD MORTALITY                           26
+
+    IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE                      36
+
+     V. AN OLD SCOTS GARDENER                   46
+
+    VI. PASTORAL                                53
+
+   VII. THE MANSE                               61
+
+  VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET                     68
+
+    IX. THOMAS STEVENSON                        75
+
+     X. TALK AND TALKERS: I.                    81
+
+    XI. TALK AND TALKERS: II.                   94
+
+   XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS                  105
+
+  XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED    116
+
+   XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S         124
+
+    XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE                    134
+
+   XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE                  148
+
+
+MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN
+
+  CHAPTER I
+                                                                    PAGE
+  The Jenkins of Stowting--Fleeming's grandfather--Mrs. Buckner's
+    fortune--Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets
+    King Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career--The
+    Campbell-Jacksons--Fleeming's mother--Fleeming's uncle John      165
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+  1833-1851
+
+  Birth and childhood--Edinburgh--Frankfort-on-the-Main--Paris--The
+    Revolution of 1848--The Insurrection--Flight to Italy--Sympathy
+    with Italy--The insurrection in Genoa--A student in Genoa--The
+    lad and his mother                                               184
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+  1851-1858
+
+  Return to England--Fleeming at Fairbairn's--Experience in a
+    strike--Dr. Bell and Greek architecture--The Gaskells--Fleeming
+    at Greenwich--The Austins--Fleeming and the Austins--His
+    engagement--Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson                          203
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+  1859-1868
+
+  Fleeming's marriage--His married life--Professional
+    difficulties--Life at Claygate--Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin--and
+    of Fleeming--Appointment to the Chair at Edinburgh               220
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+  Notes of Telegraph Voyages, 1858-1873                              231
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+  1869-1885
+
+  Edinburgh--Colleagues--_Farrago vitae_--I. The family
+    circle--Fleeming and his sons--Highland life--The cruise of the
+    steam-launch--Summer in Styria--Rustic manners--II. The
+    Drama--Private theatricals--III. Sanitary associations--The
+    phonograph--IV. Fleeming's acquaintance with a student--His late
+    maturity of mind--Religion and morality--His love of
+    heroism--Taste in literature--V. His talk--His late
+    popularity--Letter from M. Trelat                                260
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+  1875-1885
+
+  Mrs. Jenkin's illness--Captain Jenkin--The golden wedding--Death
+    of Uncle John--Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin--Illness and death
+    of the Captain--Death of Mrs. Jenkin--Effect on
+    Fleeming--Telpherage--The end                                    293
+
+
+
+
+  MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
+
+
+
+
+                TO
+            MY MOTHER
+
+     IN THE NAME OF PAST JOY
+       AND PRESENT SORROW
+
+          I DEDICATE
+
+  THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
+
+_SS. "Ludgate Hill,"
+  within sight of Cape Race_
+
+
+
+
+  _NOTE_
+
+
+_This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to
+read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A
+certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth,
+portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle,--taken
+together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost
+awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I
+had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the
+charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and
+when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to
+appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be
+surprised at the occurrence._
+
+_My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental
+youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the
+person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret; not because I love him
+better, but because with him I am still in a business partnership, and
+cannot divide interests._
+
+_Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in
+"The Cornhill," "Longman's," "Scribner," "The English Illustrated," "The
+Magazine of Art," "The Contemporary Review"; three are here in print for
+the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may be regarded as
+a private circulation._
+
+                                                           _R. L. S._
+
+
+
+
+  MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
+
+
+  I
+
+  THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
+
+  "This is no' my ain house;
+    I ken by the biggin' o't."
+
+
+Two recent books,[1] one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by
+the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people
+thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should
+arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United
+Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many
+different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts,
+from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the
+Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the
+seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race
+that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate
+the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish
+mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but
+the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in
+Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking
+woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the
+most of North America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India,
+along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan,
+is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying
+stages of transition. You may go all over the States, and--setting aside
+the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or
+Chinese--you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as
+in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in
+the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has gone
+round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our
+fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality
+of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local custom and prejudice,
+even local religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the
+nineteenth century--_imperia in imperio_, foreign things at home.
+
+In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours
+is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a domineering nature,
+steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick
+about the life of others. In French colonies, and still more in the
+Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between
+the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is
+begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life
+easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and
+ignorance. He figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the
+same disdainful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for
+some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon
+his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he
+will never condescend to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an
+authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of
+Japan to be uneatable--a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of
+Wales's marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese,
+it was proposed to give them solid English fare--roast beef and plum
+pudding, and no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic
+folly. We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the
+chance, will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit
+inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands of
+miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance
+of the religions they were trying to supplant.
+
+I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is
+better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr.
+Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He
+wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco.
+He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in
+America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of
+which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a
+term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a
+subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his book a vast
+virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view
+partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper,
+at the largest, to a clique of States; and the whole scope and
+atmosphere not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in
+reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to their
+cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness
+of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look when I find
+myself in company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to
+him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example
+were better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible
+to Mr. White than Boston to the English, and the New England
+self-sufficiency no better justified than the Britannic.
+
+It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most
+ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States;
+he is probably ignorant of India, but, considering his opportunities, he
+is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one
+country, for instance--its frontier not so far from London, its people
+closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the
+English--of which I will go bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the
+sister kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by
+anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good
+intelligence--a University man, as the phrase goes--a man, besides, who
+had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we
+live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London;
+among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice
+he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things
+were not so in Scotland. "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a matter
+of law." He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be
+informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me
+roundly; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained
+to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the
+brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked
+me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a
+monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the
+experience of Scots.
+
+England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in
+education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always
+widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant
+White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt
+ourselves foreigners on many common provocations.[2]
+
+A Scotsman may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States,
+and never again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and
+strange lands and manners as on his first excursion into England. The
+change from a hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted
+wonder. Along the flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers
+of churches. He sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the
+windmill sails. He may go where he pleases in the future; he may see
+Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure
+of that moment. There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of
+many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody
+country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant busyness,
+making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air,
+gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance
+into the tamest landscape. When the Scottish child sees them first he
+falls immediately in love; and from that time forward windmills keep
+turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree, with every feature of
+the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets;
+the green, settled, ancient look of the country; the lush hedgerows,
+stiles, and privy pathways in the fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers;
+chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding
+English speech--they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to
+English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The
+sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is blunted, but I doubt
+whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more
+rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been long
+accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens
+the sense of isolation.
+
+One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotsman's eye--the
+domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,
+venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all. We
+have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country
+places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood
+has been sparingly used in their construction; the window-frames are
+sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are
+steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and
+permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of
+cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotsman
+never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these
+brick houses--rickles of brick, as he might call them--or on one of
+these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is,
+and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. "This is no' my ain
+house; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is his own, bought
+with his own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it
+has not yet been, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his
+imagination; nor does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and
+breadth of his native country, there was no building even distantly
+resembling it.
+
+But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
+foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
+surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,
+insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own
+long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or
+two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It seems
+incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should
+have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold
+our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with
+a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with
+less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like
+a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too much,
+and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction. Yet
+surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is too
+often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often
+withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind
+evaded as with terror. A Scottish peasant will talk more liberally out
+of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational
+counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one
+interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotsman is vain, interested
+in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts
+and experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is
+self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in
+Scotland or the Scots, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does
+not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and
+being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you
+continue to associate, he would rather be reminded of your baser origin.
+Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour,
+the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest.
+That you should continually try to establish human and serious
+relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and
+desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something
+more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the
+attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of
+the educated English towers over a Scotsman by the head and shoulders.
+
+Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scottish and English youth
+begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up
+those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and,
+to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in
+both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once
+rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a
+greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy,
+and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy
+of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself
+to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily
+transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind
+and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a
+less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in
+present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are
+younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and
+perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scottish boyhood--days of
+great stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth
+of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter
+Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The
+typical English Sunday, with a huge midday dinner and the plethoric
+afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of
+the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two
+divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first
+questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What
+is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with,
+"What is the chief end of man?" and answering nobly, if obscurely, "To
+glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol
+of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked
+opens to us Scots a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is
+asked of all of us, from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly
+together. No Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would
+have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight
+for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days
+kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material
+conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying
+everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the
+black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities,
+imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level streets, the
+warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the
+architecture, among which English children begin to grow up and come to
+themselves in life. As the stage of the University approaches, the
+contrast becomes more express. The English lad goes to Oxford or
+Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic
+life, costumed, disciplined, and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be
+regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege
+besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his
+compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly
+different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a
+bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the
+public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has
+been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and
+nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the
+exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All
+classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman
+in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie
+from the parish school. They separate, at the session's end, one to
+smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the labours of
+the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class
+in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,
+fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment,
+ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the
+sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think,
+that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting these
+uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human geniality.
+Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in
+while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is always a
+juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study
+the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our
+tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming,
+lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the
+college gates, in the glare of the shop-windows, under the green glimmer
+of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in
+wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of
+the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday, _la treve
+de Dieu_.
+
+Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his
+country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and
+from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying
+iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery
+mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in
+song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories
+in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of
+oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids.
+Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of
+the legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland
+have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish
+history--Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five--were still either failures
+or defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the
+Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a
+moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small,
+the mere taproot of her extended empire; Scotland, again, which alone
+the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of
+that, and avowedly cold, sterile, and unpopulous. It is not so for
+nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater
+readiness of sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing,
+like his own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of
+boyish romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error
+serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the
+heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of
+number and Spartan poverty of life.
+
+So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter
+Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed
+in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply marked
+within the borders of Scotland itself than between the countries.
+Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet
+you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove
+to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the Highlander
+wore a different costume, spoke a different language, worshipped in
+another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social
+constitution from his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.
+Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the
+Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scots. Yet
+the Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the
+Scottish lowlands; but his courage failed him at the border, and he
+regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When the Black Watch,
+after years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped
+out and kissed the earth at Portpatrick. They had been in Ireland,
+stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well
+liked and treated with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that
+they kissed, at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people
+who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and
+hanged them since the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious,
+the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of Europe.
+They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not English,
+but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their
+minds when they thus, in thought, identified themselves with their
+ancestral enemies? What was the sense in which they were Scottish and
+not English, or Scottish and not Irish? Can a bare name be thus
+influential on the minds and affections of men, and a political
+aggregation blind them to the nature of facts? The story of the Austrian
+Empire would seem to answer No; the far more galling business of Ireland
+clinches the negative from nearer home. Is it common education, common
+morals, a common language, or a common faith, that join men into
+nations? There were practically none of these in the case we are
+considering.
+
+The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, the
+Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.
+When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's necks in spirit; even
+at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk. But from his
+compatriot in the South the Lowlander stands consciously apart. He has
+had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his will in
+other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home
+in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to
+remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the
+Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scots accent of the mind.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] 1881.
+
+  [2] The previous pages, from the opening of this essay down to
+    "provocations," are reprinted from the original edition of 1881; in
+    the reprints of which they still stand. In the Edinburgh Edition
+    they were omitted, and the essay began with "A Scotsman."--ED.
+
+
+
+
+  II
+
+  SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
+
+
+I am asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to
+the profit and glory of my _Alma Mater_;[3] and the fact is I seem to be
+in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am
+willing enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one
+point I see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the
+University itself and my own days under its shadow; of the things that
+are still the same and of those that are already changed: such talk, in
+short, as would pass naturally between a student of to-day and one of
+yesterday, supposing them to meet and grow confidential.
+
+The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; more
+swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so
+that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time
+and the succession of men. I looked for my name the other day in last
+year's case-book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it
+near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I
+began to think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found
+it, mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that
+posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
+dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is likely,
+with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less welcome; but
+I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more
+emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a
+praiser of things past.
+
+For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has
+doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by
+gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it
+does; and, what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased
+to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very
+best of _Alma Mater_; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more
+strange), had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and
+do not die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have
+befallen my successors of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of
+advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that,
+on a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the
+most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,
+unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the
+whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes of good,
+flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, morning
+journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable
+gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my
+college life. You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him; his
+virtues, I make sure, are inconceivable to his successors, just as they
+were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically
+alone in the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how
+much he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun)
+seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune and
+dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went. And it may
+be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their season, and
+that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth in
+particular are things but of a moment. So this student, whom I have in
+my eye, took his full share of these concerns, and that very largely by
+his own fault; but he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst of
+much misconduct, kept on in his own way learning how to work; and at
+last, to his wonder, escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly
+shamed; leaving behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good
+deal of its interest for myself.
+
+But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is by no
+means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-day, if
+they knew what they had lost, would regret also. They have still Tait,
+to be sure--long may they have him!--and they have still Tait's
+class-room, cupola and all; but think of what a different place it was
+when this youth of mine (at least on roll days) would be present on the
+benches, and, at the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior[4] was
+airing his robust old age. It is possible my successors may have never
+even heard of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a link snapped with the
+last century. He had something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and
+plain; he spoke with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire;
+his reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with
+post-chaises--a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire on the
+Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own grandfather. Thus he
+was for me a mirror of things perished; it was only in his memory that I
+could see the huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream to leeward,
+and the watchers, as they fed the fire, lay hold unscorched of the
+windward bars of the furnace; it was only thus that I could see my
+grandfather driving swiftly in a gig along the seaboard road from
+Pittenweem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, drawing up to speak
+good-humouredly with those he met. And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone
+also; inhabits only the memories of other men, till these shall follow
+him; and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his.
+
+To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a
+prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man
+filled with the mathematics. And doubtless these are set-offs. But they
+cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that
+Professor Kelland is dead. No man's education is complete or truly
+liberal who knew not Kelland. There were unutterable lessons in the mere
+sight of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a
+fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of
+that very kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class
+time, though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in
+out-of-the-way English parishes when he was young; thus playing the same
+part as Lindsay--the part of the surviving memory, signalling out of the
+dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished things. But it
+was a part that scarce became him; he somehow lacked the means: for all
+his silver hair and worn face, he was not truly old; and he had too much
+of the unrest and petulant fire of youth, and too much invincible
+innocence of mind, to play the veteran well. The time to measure him
+best, to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he
+received his class at home. What a pretty simplicity would he then show,
+trying to amuse us like children with toys; and what an engaging
+nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed!
+Truly, he made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed,
+but at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious,
+troubled elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us. A theorist
+has held the view that there is no feature in man so tell-tale as his
+spectacles; that the mouth may be compressed and the brow smoothed
+artificially, but the sheen of the barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it
+must have been thus with Kelland; for as I still fancy I behold him
+frisking actively about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem
+to see most clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection. I
+never knew but one other man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so
+kind a spectacle, and that was Dr. Appleton.[5] But the light in his
+case was tempered and passive; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and
+flashed vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to
+goodwill.
+
+I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.
+Kelland's class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of
+merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although I am
+the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor's own hand, I
+cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class above a dozen
+times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once)
+while in the very act of writing the document above referred to, that he
+did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting
+upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me
+a great deal of trouble to put in exercise--perhaps as much as would
+have taught me Greek--and sent me forth into the world and the
+profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they
+say it is always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is
+its own reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon this
+I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more
+deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less education.
+One consequence, however, of my system is that I have much less to say
+of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; and as he is still
+alive, and will long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not surprise
+you very much that I have no intention of saying it.
+
+Meanwhile, how many others have gone--Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not
+who besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng the arch
+and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest
+parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their
+fathers in their "resting-graves"! And again, how many of these last
+have not found their way there, all too early, through the stress of
+education! That was one thing, at least, from which my truantry
+protected me. I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be
+sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I know the name of that branch of
+knowledge which is worth acquiring at the price of a brain fever. There
+are many sordid tragedies in the life of the student, above all if he be
+poor, or drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than
+the case of the lad who is in too much hurry to be learned. And so, for
+the sake of a moral at the end, I will call up one more figure, and have
+done. A student, ambitious of success by that hot, intemperate manner of
+study that now grows so common, read night and day for an examination.
+As he went on, the task became more easy to him, sleep was more easily
+banished, his brain grew hot and clear and more capacious, the necessary
+knowledge daily fuller and more orderly. It came to the eve of the
+trial, and he watched all night in his high chamber, reviewing what he
+knew, and already secure of success. His window looked eastward, and
+being (as I said) high up, and the house itself standing on a hill,
+commanded a view over dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last my
+student drew up his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked
+abroad. Day was breaking, the east was tinging with strange fires, the
+clouds breaking up for the coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless
+terror seized upon his mind. He was sane, his senses were undisturbed;
+he saw clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and knew that it was
+normal; but he could neither bear to see it nor find the strength to
+look away, and fled in panic from his chamber into the enclosure of the
+street. In the cool air and silence, and among the sleeping houses, his
+strength was renewed. Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had
+passed, and an abject fear of its return.
+
+  "Gallo canente, spes redit,
+   Aegris salus refunditur,
+   Lapsis fides revertitur,"
+
+as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office. But to him that
+good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had brought panic,
+and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook to think of. He
+dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat; he sat down, he rose
+up, he wandered; the city woke about him with its cheerful bustle, the
+sun climbed overhead; and still he grew but the more absorbed in the
+distress of his recollection and the fear of his past fear. At the
+appointed hour he came to the door of the place of examination; but when
+he was asked, he had forgotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, they
+had not the heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted
+him, still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He could
+only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all,
+his mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day and his own
+intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing in a brain fever.
+
+People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent
+reason; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of
+the mind as fell on this young man. We all have by our bedsides the box
+of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but when a
+young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is
+playing with the lock.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [3] For the "Book" of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair, 1886.
+
+  [4] Professor Tait's laboratory assistant.
+
+  [5] Charles Edward Appleton, D.C.L., Fellow of St. John's College,
+    Oxford, founder and first editor of the _Academy_: born 1841, died
+    1879.
+
+
+
+
+  III
+
+  OLD MORTALITY
+
+
+  I
+
+There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison,
+on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep
+cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of
+the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long.
+The aisles are lined with the enclosed sepulchres of families, door
+beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadows of
+the prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves.
+There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant
+incidents are woven with my memory of the place. I here made friends
+with a certain plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely
+cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped
+about his youth like winter sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel
+once, for some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and
+kept my wild heart flying; and once--she possibly remembers--the wise
+Eugenia followed me to that austere enclosure. Her hair came down, and
+in the shelter of a tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the
+braid. But for the most part I went there solitary, and, with
+irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name after
+name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle dates: a
+regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and had
+thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room,
+wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that whole crew of the
+silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a picture; and
+he, with his comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in
+scarlet, and in his day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, like
+a taunt, among that company of phantom appellations. It was possible,
+then, to leave behind us something more explicit than these severe,
+monotonous, and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a
+painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly
+more desirable than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed
+beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the
+housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the
+fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the sea.
+
+And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David
+Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's
+dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own
+nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and
+grey tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
+elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk
+among the tombs of spirits: and it is only in the course of years, and
+after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to
+see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own
+for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street,
+and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the
+meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple,
+the sweet whiff of chloroform--for there, on the most thoughtless, the
+pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
+divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of
+man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his
+ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go
+again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be
+still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.
+The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in
+immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
+Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken
+gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of
+a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet
+here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard
+alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the
+memorials of the dead.
+
+Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon
+their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy
+of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to
+excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity
+of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
+not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in
+that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding
+the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits
+us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to
+his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he
+should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to
+Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a
+grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count
+"Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more
+pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism.
+
+But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann.
+And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I
+began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was
+weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was
+day-spring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to
+see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and
+modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally
+from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I remember to have
+observed two working women with a baby halting by a grave; there was
+something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child,
+the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles
+under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I
+overheard their judgment on that wonder: "Eh! what extravagance!" To a
+youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and
+pregnant saying appeared merely base.
+
+My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was
+unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red
+evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral,
+told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his
+labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey;
+and, in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season
+of the year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others
+whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavour of the gardener hung
+about them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had engagements to
+keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with
+mankind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there was
+no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on
+spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well
+to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide
+the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and
+dates. It would be "in fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened, for
+"Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their past patients--familiarly
+but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a
+servant, whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright
+table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe
+beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the
+burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a
+superficial touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he
+attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is
+on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton
+differs from the Scottish. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his years
+of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride
+common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor
+even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the
+shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be
+something different from human if his solitary open-air and tragic
+labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil
+isle, apart from city clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient
+effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his
+contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall,
+he counts them; and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps
+appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly
+influence of habit grows to be his pride and pleasure. There are many
+common stories telling how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But
+I will rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose
+unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage
+built into the wall of the churchyard; and through a bull's-eye pane
+above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the
+upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Moderate; 'tis
+certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of death-bed
+dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived beyond man's
+natural years, that his life had been easy and reputable, that his
+family had all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now
+behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the majority. The
+grave-digger heard him out; then he raised himself up on one elbow, and
+with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his
+lifelong labours. "Doctor," he said, "I hae laid three hunner and
+fower-score in that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull," indicating
+Heaven, "I would hae likit weel to hae made out the fower hunner." But
+it was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part
+to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry him.
+
+
+  II
+
+I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground
+of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave,
+is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he
+sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague
+epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is
+all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire
+unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to
+be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable,
+and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant
+Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his
+truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad, and gather
+flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no
+longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice
+or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a
+power that wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn
+compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet storing up.
+
+The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble
+fallibility. When we have fallen through story after story of our vanity
+and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin
+to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our
+own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others, and
+still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in
+with the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf
+the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that
+at the last, when such a pin falls out--when there vanishes in the least
+breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for
+our supply--when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the
+faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with
+those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to
+memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace
+of our life.
+
+
+  III
+
+One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us
+labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most
+serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint
+thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great
+gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student
+gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw
+him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies; we
+loved his notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than
+when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked
+among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds
+of a most influential life.
+
+The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back,
+I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow
+of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding,
+urbanity, and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our
+friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent, and inhumane;
+and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry demolish honest sentiment. I
+can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit
+streets, "La ci darem la mano" on his lips, a noble figure of a youth,
+but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere
+on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony, and
+his self-respect miserably went down.
+
+From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore,
+bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had
+deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there
+was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body
+he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed
+resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He
+returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth;
+lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable;
+at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him
+down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready, but
+with a kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that
+unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low.
+Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great
+while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his
+last step gentle, urbane, and with the will to smile.
+
+The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him,
+the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but
+himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to
+think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his
+instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of
+remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and
+pointed with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him
+then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over
+whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we
+gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the
+rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear
+and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts
+that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we
+disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of
+his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently
+awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; and to see
+him there, so gentle, patient, brave, and pious, oppressed but not cast
+down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to
+pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our
+wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to
+fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly _abandon_, like one who
+condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for
+a kingdom. Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own
+disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they
+repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.
+But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: _mene, mene_; and
+condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough; had
+earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to murmur.
+
+Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength;
+but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had
+betrayed him--"for our strength is weakness"--he began to blossom and
+bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore
+thrown down before the great deliverer. We
+
+    "in the vast cathedral leave him;
+  God accept him,
+  Christ receive him!"
+
+
+  IV
+
+If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the
+irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these
+foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the
+difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the
+heroes of defeat.
+
+I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place; pause,
+with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A
+pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and
+an ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a
+reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example;
+and, in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of
+the dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the
+valley of humiliation;--of whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had
+the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you,
+that in former times men have met with angels here, have found pearls
+here, and have in this place found the words of life."
+
+
+
+
+  IV
+
+  A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
+
+
+  I
+
+All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the
+pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end,
+which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one
+to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I
+saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either
+read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note
+down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus
+I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it
+was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished
+to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I
+would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I
+practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with
+myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any
+one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and
+country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also;
+often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played
+many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations
+from memory.
+
+This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried
+to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school
+of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the
+most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught
+me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less
+intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and
+the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come
+by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set
+me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as
+there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever
+I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a
+thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was
+either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I
+must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was
+unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again
+unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts
+I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the
+co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt,
+to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to
+Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these
+monkey tricks, which was called "The Vanity of Morals": it was to have
+had a second part, "The Vanity of Knowledge"; and as I had neither
+morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was
+never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for
+recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first
+in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast
+on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas
+Browne. So with my other works: "Cain," an epic, was (save the mark!) an
+imitation of "Sordello": "Robin Hood," a tale in verse, took an eclectic
+middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer, and Morris: in
+_Monmouth_, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my
+innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first
+draft of _The King's Pardon_, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no less a
+man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with
+staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of
+course conceived my fable in a less serious vein--for it was not
+Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought
+to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the
+inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of "The Book of
+Snobs." So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and
+down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were
+not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas,
+but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another
+hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the
+other, originally known as _Semiramis: a Tragedy_, I have observed on
+bookstalls under the _alias_ of "Prince Otto." But enough has been said
+to show by what arts of impersonation and in what purely ventriloquial
+efforts I first saw my words on paper.
+
+That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have
+profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was
+never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we
+could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival
+of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier
+and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: "But this is not
+the way to be original!" It is not; nor is there any way but to be born
+so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this
+training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be
+none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike
+Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have
+tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a
+prime force in letters: he was of all men the most imitative.
+Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It
+is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers, it is
+almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless
+exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the
+considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the
+student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose
+and preserve a fitting key of language, he should long have practised
+the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that
+he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens
+of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself
+knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's
+ability) able to do it.
+
+And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines
+beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he
+please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very
+true saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have
+had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own
+performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I
+could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them
+even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I
+must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain
+with me. "Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why
+you do lyrics so badly." No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way
+of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These
+were returned; and I was not surprised or even pained. If they had not
+been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there
+was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked
+at--well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on
+learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the
+occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in
+print, and to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of
+the public.
+
+
+  II
+
+The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted
+among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant,
+Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an
+accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of
+the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with
+pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like
+some goodly dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in
+their wire cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table,
+many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a
+former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read;
+here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks
+askance at these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect
+on the whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned
+mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt of
+dead lions than all the living dogs of the professoriate.
+
+I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very
+humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for;
+yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I
+was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and, in particular, proud of
+being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were
+then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name
+on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential
+in the law courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been
+reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that
+battle of life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They
+were all three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most
+conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a
+reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to
+one of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill
+fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the _Comedie Humaine_.
+He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of which I
+write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to
+heaven next day in the _Courant_, and the day after was dashed lower
+than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the _Scotsman_. Report would
+have it (I daresay very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he
+particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its
+truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a
+pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a
+boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely
+tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he
+took flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk
+of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years
+thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed, always in good
+hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of his
+manner may have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners are
+very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood; and
+to explain the miracle of his continued existence, I must fall back upon
+the theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same
+kind, "there was a suffering relative in the background." From this
+genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me
+out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I
+best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking
+quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer;
+smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow
+with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick,
+with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with singular deliberation
+and, to a patient listener, excellent effect. After all these ups and
+downs, he seemed still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to
+breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of
+his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had
+set himself to found the strangest thing in our society: one of those
+periodical sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions;
+in which young gentlemen from the Universities are encouraged, at so
+much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations, and calumniate
+private individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a
+man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod;
+and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for
+Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as
+they did the other day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works,
+as I hope you have just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon
+some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a
+favourite slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his
+own life that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his
+paper single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic;
+up early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily
+ear-wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
+that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
+courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and doubtless
+ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems
+there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his
+paper died after him; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it
+must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing.
+
+These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the
+mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary.
+We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor
+thing to come into the world at all and leave no more behind one than
+Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less; and
+this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in
+a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old,
+graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of _Alma Mater_
+(which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without
+haggling, for some pence--this book may alone preserve a memory of James
+Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.
+
+Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they were
+all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to them, and
+made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and
+hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active
+brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers
+of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University
+building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four
+were to be conjunct editors, and, what was the main point of the
+concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of
+arithmetic--that flatterer of credulity--the adventure must succeed and
+bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that
+morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three
+distinguished students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my
+first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my
+fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not
+withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart,
+I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not be
+worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; and I
+kept wondering how I should be able, upon my compact income of twelve
+pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It
+was a comfortable thought to me that I had a father.
+
+The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it,
+for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed
+obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all
+four of us with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the
+hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been
+a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be
+still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked
+so hopefully in the Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that
+might have gone to print a "Shakespeare" on, and was instead so clumsily
+defaced with nonsense! And, shall I say, Poor Editors? I cannot pity
+myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the
+wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into
+half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a
+copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged,
+and who did all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact,
+passed over the gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will
+not say that I was pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any
+chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that I thought the
+better of her taste. I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had
+the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid
+over my share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who
+rubbed their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than
+formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise
+with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I
+told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to
+work I went again with my penny version-books, having fallen back in one
+day from the printed author to the manuscript student.
+
+
+  III
+
+From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers.
+The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to
+straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains
+invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would print the
+thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of
+its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent
+and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume of
+Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand
+alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and Robert
+drew very close together in their lives; for John was rough--he smelt of
+the windy brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the
+hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the
+two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the old Adam that pleases
+men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he was a wayfarer besides,
+and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and however Robert's
+profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man
+of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to
+recast a piece of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a
+maturer touch. And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other
+country two such men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet of
+some twenty cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill.
+
+
+
+
+  V
+
+  AN OLD SCOTS GARDENER
+
+
+I think I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the
+uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the south-western hills there
+may yet linger a decrepit representative of this bygone good fellowship;
+but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life
+who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew
+Fairservice,--though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence
+could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern
+flower-plots. There was a dignity about his tall, stooping form, and an
+earnestness in his wrinkled face, that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don
+Quixote who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been
+nourished in his youth on "Walker's Lives" and "The Hind let Loose."
+
+Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
+preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this
+as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the
+infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so difficult to tell
+the little that I know, he stands essentially as a _genius loci_. It is
+impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden
+in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its
+shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from
+the north-west corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of
+each other. When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make
+him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best
+that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but
+to me it will be ever impotent.
+
+The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he
+had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking-horse. Latterly he
+was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the
+parish register worth all the reasons in the world. "_I am old and well
+stricken in years_," he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold
+enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over
+all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a
+gardener. He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and
+reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry
+figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days.
+He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity. He told of
+places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were
+meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad
+shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was
+condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots. You were
+thrown at once into an invidious position. You felt that you were
+profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will
+consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with
+the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen
+who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen
+Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical,
+for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your
+garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge,
+throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile
+section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in
+supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of
+your own artichokes, "_That I wull, mem_," he would say, "_with
+pleesure, for it is mair blessed to give than to receive_." Ay, and
+even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer
+our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad,
+professing that "_our wull was his pleesure_," but yet reminding us that
+he would do it "_with feelin's_,"--even then, I say, the triumphant
+master felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance
+only, that he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and
+that the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit
+of the unworthy takes."
+
+In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting
+sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses, and holding in supreme
+aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned, or wild. There was one
+exception to this sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on
+the last count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shrubbery
+was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his
+bill in order to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as he told me
+once, speaking in that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned
+common folk can use nowadays, his heart grew "_proud_" within him when
+he came on a burn-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with
+their graceful trophies; and not all his apprenticeship and practice for
+so many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish
+recollections from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the
+beauty of all that was bygone. He abounded in old stories of his
+boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures, and when he
+went (on a holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth
+where he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite
+reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have
+shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.
+
+But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking
+for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers
+together. They were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments
+for ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his cauliflowers and peas
+and cabbage that his heart grew warm. His preference for the more useful
+growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-plots, and
+an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. He
+would prelect over some thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling
+reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.
+Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed,
+raised "_finer o' them_"; but it seemed that no one else had been
+favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were mere
+foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with
+perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so-and-so had wondered, and
+such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his
+rivals only that he parted praise and blame. If you remarked how well a
+plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with
+solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the
+other hand, you called his attention to some back-going vegetable, he
+would quote Scripture: "_Paul may plant, and Apollos may water_"; all
+blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or
+untimely frosts.
+
+There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his
+favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the bee-hive. Their
+sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had taken hold
+of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot
+say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to him by some
+recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood. Nevertheless, he
+was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal
+dignity to mingle in any active office towards them. But he could stand
+by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest
+that it was quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the
+cries of the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a
+man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the
+bees for text. "_They are indeed wonderfu' creatures, mem_," he said
+once. "_They just mind me o' what the Queen of Sheba said to
+Solomon--and I think she said it wi' a sigh,--'The half of it hath not
+been told unto me.'_"
+
+As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old Covenanters,
+of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth was full of sacred
+quotations; it was the book that he had studied most and thought upon
+most deeply. To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns,
+are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding
+themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the
+very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap
+educational series. This was Robert's position. All day long he had
+dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew
+poetry and Gospel ethics; until they had struck deep root into his
+heart, and the very expressions had become a part of him; so that he
+rarely spoke without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave
+a raciness to the merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of the
+Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and
+ready store of reference. He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love:
+he interposed between man and wife: he threw himself between the angry,
+touching his hat the while with all the ceremony of an usher. He
+protected the birds from everybody but himself, seeing, I suppose, a
+great difference between official execution and wanton sport. His
+mistress telling him one day to put some ferns into his master's
+particular corner, and adding, "Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't
+deserve them, for he wouldn't help me to gather them," "_Eh, mem_,"
+replied Robert, "_but I wouldna say that, for I think he's just a most
+deservin' gentleman_." Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate
+terms, and accustomed to use language to each other somewhat without the
+bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position of a
+seat in the garden. The discussion, as was usual when these two were at
+it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides. Every one accustomed
+to such controversies several times a day was quietly enjoying this
+prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit--every one but Robert, to whom the
+perfect good faith of the whole quarrel seemed unquestionable, and who,
+after having waited till his conscience would suffer him to wait no
+more, and till he expected every moment that the disputants would fall
+to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: "_Eh,
+but, gentlemen, I wad hae nae mair words about it!_" One thing was
+noticeable about Robert's religion: it was neither dogmatic nor
+sectarian. He never expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the
+doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned anybody else. I have no
+doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as
+considerably out of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy;
+and the natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about
+Free-Churchism; but, at least, he never talked about these views, never
+grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the belief or
+practice of anybody. Now all this is not generally characteristic of
+Scots piety; Scots sects being churches militant with a vengeance, and
+Scots believers perpetual crusaders the one against the other, and
+missionaries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert's originally tender
+heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and
+pleasant labour among fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny
+creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and
+the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,
+
+  "Annihilating all that's made
+   To a green thought in a green shade."
+
+But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of
+his innocent and living piety. I had meant to tell of his cottage, with
+the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that
+he had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically: "_He
+was real pleased wi' it at first, but I think he's got a kind o' tired
+o' it now_"--the son being then a man of about forty. But I will let all
+these pass. "'Tis more significant: he's dead." The earth, that he had
+digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the
+flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new
+and nearer way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to
+honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour
+of its kind: "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing? and yet not
+one of them falleth to the ground."
+
+Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death to
+greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the haughty
+Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant
+of God.
+
+
+
+
+  VI
+
+  PASTORAL
+
+
+To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
+novelties; but to leave it when years have come only casts a more
+endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr.
+Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly
+the central features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new
+impression only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of
+native places. So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany
+Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer
+marching his company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the
+soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the
+remembered aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in
+particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for
+Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one
+of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers
+about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of
+Scotland are incomparable in themselves--or I am only the more Scottish
+to suppose so--and their sound and colour dwell for ever in the memory.
+How often and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or
+Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the bright
+burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks in the den
+behind Kingussie! I think shame to leave out one of these enchantresses,
+but the list would grow too long if I remembered all; only I may not
+forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for
+all its pollutions, that Water of Leith of the many and well-named
+mills--Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn
+of pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless
+trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from
+Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss under the
+Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a rock, where I
+loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in its infancy
+by subterranean pipes for the service of the sea-beholding city in the
+plain. From many points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole
+course and that of all its tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput
+may visit all its corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be
+breathed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent
+cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it
+would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland
+sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river;
+it would take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the
+most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the
+sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain _genius loci_, I am
+condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (who
+cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would
+gladly carry the reader along with me.
+
+John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the
+Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering,
+sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when the
+drove-roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were
+thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched flocks into England,
+sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a
+rough business, not without danger. The drove-roads lay apart from
+habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea
+fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the
+one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes
+were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of
+which offences had a moorland burial, and were never heard of in the
+courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked,--by
+two men after his watch,--and at least once, betrayed by his habitual
+anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic
+prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more
+heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter
+places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the
+inroads of pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to
+wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by
+snatches; in the grey of the summer morning, and already from far up the
+hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his shoutings; and in
+the lambing-time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This
+wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the
+Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which
+men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part he was
+at first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural
+abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only
+by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot
+amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this ogre;
+I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the Killing
+Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing
+dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities: his hail at sight
+of me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met
+but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the calumet with
+the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the
+ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone
+in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me
+a cry" over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and
+for me to overtake and bear him company.
+
+That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in
+ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honeyed,
+friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He
+laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw,
+hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was
+permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like
+a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain, and a threat of latent
+anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and
+harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of
+Scots I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a
+surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with
+new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master,
+stalking a little before me, "beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging
+loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding
+me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men
+of his trade. I might count him with the best talkers; only that talking
+Scots and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing
+at least but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you;
+when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing
+took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans
+of sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the
+yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionately thinned and
+strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the
+weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of
+sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he could present so
+humanly, and with so much old experience and living gusto, that
+weariness was excluded. And in the midst he would suddenly straighten
+his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the
+sharp thunder of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so
+that you saw at last the use of that great wealth of names for every
+knowe and howe upon the hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with
+lowered tails and raised faces, would run up their flags again to the
+masthead and spread themselves upon the indicated circuit. It used to
+fill me with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story.
+But John denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the constant
+butt of his passion and contempt; it was just possible to work with the
+like of them, he said,--not more than possible. And then he would expand
+upon the subject of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one
+really good dog that he had himself possessed. He had been offered forty
+pounds for it; but a good collie was worth more than that, more than
+anything, to a "herd"; he did the herd's work for him. "As for the like
+of them!" he would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of
+his assistants.
+
+Once--I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born
+_Britannis in montibus_, indeed, but alas! _inerudito saeculo_--once, in
+the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on
+the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach
+to John, and a slur upon the dog; and both were alive to their
+misfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had
+found a pair of sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask for
+restitution. But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights.
+"How were they marked?" he asked; and since John had bought right and
+left from many sellers, and had no notion of the marks--"Very well,"
+said the farmer, "then it's only right that I should keep
+them."--"Well," said John, "it's a fact that I canna tell the sheep; but
+if my dog can, will ye let me have them?" The farmer was honest as well
+as hard, and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he
+had all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's
+dog into the midst. That hairy man of business knew his errand well; he
+knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their shame) lost
+them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the Lord knows how, unless
+by listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery; and
+without pause or blunder singled out, first one and then the other, the
+two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and
+refused. And the shepherd and his dog--what do I say? the true shepherd
+and his man--set off together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and
+"smiled to ither" all the way home, with the two recovered ones before
+them. So far, so good; but intelligence may be abused. The dog, as he is
+by little man's inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in
+virtue; and John had another collie tale of quite a different
+complexion. At the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton,
+wise men say) there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for
+washing sheep. John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he
+was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the
+deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog; knew him
+for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant farm; one whom
+perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully steering flocks to
+market. But what did the practitioner so far from home? and why this
+guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the pool?--for it was towards the
+pool that he was heading. John lay the closer under his bush, and
+presently saw the dog come forth upon the margin, look all about to see
+if he were anywhere observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himself over
+head and ears, and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike
+homeward over the hills. That same night word was sent his master, and
+the rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence
+before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for alas!
+he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; and it was
+from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so far to cleanse
+himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton.
+
+A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life,
+in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it
+ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or
+written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that
+writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who
+reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have
+never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors
+rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine
+_dilettante_, but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to
+speak of parlours and shades of manner and still-born niceties of
+motive, and begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death, or
+childbirth; and thus ancient out-door crafts and occupations, whether
+Mr. Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the
+scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged
+things have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much
+to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal
+taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of
+the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost
+art which was once the fashion of an empire; and those only are
+perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that roused men in all
+epochs of the past. There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution
+but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a certain
+low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees,
+next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see
+squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his
+berries--his wife, that accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his
+name I never heard, but he is often described as Probably Arboreal,
+which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but
+at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run
+some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still
+tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have
+moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.
+
+We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I had
+one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. But yet I think I owe
+my taste for that hillside business rather to the art and interest of
+John Todd. He it was that made it live for me as the artist can make all
+things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep
+upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy
+aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I
+never weary of recalling to mind; the shadow of the night darkening on
+the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow-shower moving here and there
+like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black
+dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly
+harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centre-piece to all these
+features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain's
+eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of
+bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I
+still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not
+far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking
+hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile,
+standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch
+of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.
+
+
+
+
+  VII
+
+  THE MANSE
+
+
+I have named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty
+Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the
+choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain
+water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for
+the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and
+darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold;
+and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill
+just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black
+heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many
+other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was
+when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife,
+have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it
+must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the
+point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be
+exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb
+to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as
+low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may
+be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds;--and the
+year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the river-side I may find
+the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged.
+
+It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces
+by a great hedge of beech, and overlooked by the church and the terrace
+of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall
+"spunkies" might be seen to dance, at least by children; flower-plots
+lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a
+pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with
+an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water everywhere, and the
+sound of mills--the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain;
+the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods
+pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the
+midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish
+stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I
+supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is
+difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of
+stalwart sons and tall daughters was housed and reared, and came to man
+and woman-hood, in that nest of little chambers; so that the face of the
+earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with
+outlandish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of
+the little chambers brightened with the wonders of the East. The dullest
+could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign
+places: a well-beloved house--its image fondly dwelt on by many
+travellers.
+
+Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him,
+judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as a
+man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the
+display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a lover of
+his life and innocent habits to the end. We children admired him: partly
+for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are
+concerned for beauty, and above all for beauty in the old; partly for
+the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all
+observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I
+now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with
+a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons
+or letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a
+library of bloodless books--or so they seemed in those days, although I
+have some of them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read
+them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our
+imaginations. But the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian
+pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for
+I have no such passions now) the greed with which I beheld them; and
+when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went,
+quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that,
+if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture.
+
+  "Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will
+     He slumber that thee keeps,"
+
+it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to
+set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a
+task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must suppose the
+old man thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the
+performance; for he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness,
+and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that,
+for that day, we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception
+into so tender a surprise that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed
+the hope was one of those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with
+no design upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my
+grandfather should strip himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts
+and reminders of his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he
+should bestow it upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving
+all that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the
+rod in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young.
+The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had
+over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the end of
+his many days. He sat by the dining-room fire, with his white hair, pale
+face, and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given
+him a dose of our good old Scots medicine, Dr. Gregory's powder. Now
+that remedy, as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have
+a savour of romance for the imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the
+palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being
+accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching a
+"barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in her
+hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered at once. I
+had had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar kiss: so he
+decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming
+opportunely to the kitchen door--for such was our unlordly fashion--I
+was taken for the last time from the presence of my grandfather.
+
+Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must
+suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I,
+though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them.
+He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it
+in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the
+quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have
+been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also and am persuaded
+I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made
+embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never
+made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of
+knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it.
+He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better
+with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had
+chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may possibly
+inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try
+as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all
+the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my
+blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and
+centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love
+of mills--or had I an ancestor a miller?--and a kindness for the
+neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry--or
+had I an ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played
+himself?--for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me
+played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green
+avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still
+a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed,
+perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet
+thought upon; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its
+site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener's. All this I
+had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I
+have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our
+first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of
+Burns's Dr. Smith--"Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have
+forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at
+first hand.
+
+And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this _homunculus_ or
+part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.
+Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other _homunculi_ or
+part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower
+order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to
+college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking
+down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron;--we may have had a
+rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain carpenter in I
+know not what wynd of the old smoky city; or, upon some holiday
+excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a
+flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his shuttle. And these
+were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; and from the eyes of the
+lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn father, and one-quarter of
+myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college. Nothing of all this
+would cross the mind of the young student, as he posted up the Bridges
+with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scots
+still unadulterated. It would not cross his mind that he should have a
+daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not
+unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a
+grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; and
+some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year or two
+longer in the person of their child.
+
+But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy;
+and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
+backward the careers of our _homunculi_ and be reminded of our antenatal
+lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
+elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at
+Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of
+letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St.
+Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the
+great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and
+shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
+from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a West
+India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie's, and
+managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I was with my
+engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he
+sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us "The
+Pirate" and "The Lord of the Isles"; I was with him, too, on the Bell
+Rock, in the fog, when the _Smeaton_ had drifted from her moorings, and
+the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he
+must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible
+words; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe,"
+and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat
+unmoved reading in his Bible--or affecting to read--till one after
+another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes,
+parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them
+well. And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up
+can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of
+ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly
+preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the legions
+of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldaean
+plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see
+peering through the disparted branches? What sleeper in green tree-tops,
+what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal in his
+habits....
+
+And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with
+me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in
+his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an
+aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories,
+like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts
+awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be
+distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the
+old divine.
+
+
+
+
+  VIII
+
+  MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET
+
+
+Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their
+recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and
+scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a
+buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on
+the playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which
+cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,
+the little sun-bright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye
+with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. _Glueck und unglueck
+wird gesang_, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
+original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to
+wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to
+fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
+looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
+substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.
+
+One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used one
+but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, where I once
+waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on
+both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an
+island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer's day, hearkening to the
+shearers at work in riverside fields and to the drums of the grey old
+garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And this was, I think, done
+rightly: the place was rightly peopled--and now belongs not to me but to
+my puppets--for a time at least. In time, perhaps, the puppets will
+grow faint; the original memory swim up instant as ever; and I shall
+once more lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it
+is in nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in
+butterburrs; and wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that
+memory; and be pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire
+to weave it into art.
+
+There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me.
+I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later on, threw upon
+its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its
+tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet faded; the
+sound of the sentences is still in my mind's ear; and I am under a spell
+to write of that island again.
+
+
+  I
+
+The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner of the
+Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which you may see
+the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the other, where you
+shall be able to mark on a clear surfy day the breakers running white on
+many sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first remember seeing it, framed
+in the round bull's-eye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its
+shores like the waters of a lake, the colourless, clear light of the
+early morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood
+upon it, in those days, a single rude house of uncemented stones,
+approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it
+was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely
+withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of
+peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of
+the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores
+of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole,
+sounding as we went; and, having taken stock of all possible
+accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of operations.
+For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse steamer to anchor
+in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to seaward, a certain black
+rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran
+reefs. Here was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, for the conduct
+of seamen. But as the rock was small, and hard of access, and far from
+land, the work would be one of years; and my father was now looking for
+a shore station where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men
+live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor.
+
+I saw Earraid next from the stern-thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough
+and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a
+beautiful, clear, northern summer eve. And behold! there was now a pier
+of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a
+street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden
+bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put
+together experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the
+hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her
+moorings. All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking
+tools; and even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern
+to and fro, in the dark settlement, and could light the pipe of any
+midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday,
+when the sound of the tools ceased, and there fell a crystal quiet. All
+about the green compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday's best,
+walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully
+smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening
+to the wailing of the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath
+services, held, as they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner
+reading at a table, and the congregation perched about in the double
+tier of sleeping-bunks; and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the
+chapters," the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent
+lighthouse prayer.
+
+In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed
+to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the
+very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More,
+the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea-miles of the
+great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a
+brace of wallowing stone-lighters. The open ocean widened upon either
+board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon,
+before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where
+the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron
+barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes
+waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the
+mid-sea. An ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant
+assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might
+play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the
+Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with
+an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect
+between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of
+sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race and
+growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the
+calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. Times were
+different upon Dhu Heartach when it blew, and the night fell dark, and
+the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and
+the men sat prisoned high up in their iron drum, that then resounded
+with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat with them in their
+sea-beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in anxious faces when
+some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and
+sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr.
+Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of
+undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human
+minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only that
+I saw Dhu Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer
+afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an
+enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo,
+riding in her wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she
+rose on the long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.
+
+
+  II
+
+But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse
+settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the top of the
+first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face
+of things unchanged by any of man's doings. Here was no living presence,
+save for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, grey, rain-beaten ram
+that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the
+haunting and the piping of the gulls. It was older than man; it was
+found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's
+priests. The earthy savour of the bog plants, the rude disorder of the
+boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and
+the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden
+springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the
+isle,--all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt
+with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past ages.
+
+  "Delightful would it be to me to be in _Uchd Ailiun_
+     On the pinnacle of a rock,
+   That I might often see
+     The face of the ocean;
+   That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
+     Source of happiness;
+   That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
+     Upon the rocks:
+   At times at work without compulsion--
+     This would be delightful;
+   At times plucking dulse from the rocks;
+     At times at fishing."
+
+So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred
+years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid.
+
+And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and
+sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were roaring
+for days together on French battle-fields; and I would sit in my isle (I
+call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the
+loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men's wounds,
+and the weariness of their marching. And I would think too of that other
+war which is as old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man; the
+unsparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of seventy
+years, dear-bought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls,
+and the poor rewards. It was a long look forward; the future summoned me
+as with trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and
+beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a
+childish bather on the beach.
+
+There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much
+together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat and
+spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most
+part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures;
+wondering together what should there befall us; hearing with surprise
+the sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As far, and
+as hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems
+now to look backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that
+loath submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our
+necks under the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the other
+day; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon my part, I
+was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so composed and
+sedentary in the world; and how much we had gained, and how much we had
+lost, to attain to that composure; and which had been upon the whole our
+best estate: when we sat there prating sensibly like men of some
+experience, or when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a
+western islet.
+
+
+
+
+  IX
+
+  THOMAS STEVENSON
+
+  CIVIL ENGINEER
+
+
+The death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the general
+reader. His service to mankind took on forms of which the public knows
+little and understands less. He came seldom to London, and then only as
+a task, remaining always a stranger and a convinced provincial; putting
+up for years at the same hotel where his father had gone before him;
+faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same church, and the same
+theatre, chosen simply for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine
+out. He had a circle of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more
+beloved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and
+wherever he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his
+strange, humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him
+up friends and admirers. But to the general public and the world of
+London, except about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained
+unknown. All the time, his lights were in every part of the world,
+guiding the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers to the Indian,
+the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh
+was a world-centre for that branch of applied science; in Germany, he
+had been called "the Nestor of lighthouse illumination"; even in France,
+where his claims were long denied, he was at last, on the occasion of
+the late Exposition, recognised and medalled. And to show by one
+instance the inverted nature of his reputation, comparatively small at
+home, yet filling the world, a friend of mine was this winter on a
+visit to the Spanish main, and was asked by a Peruvian if he "knew Mr.
+Stevenson the author, because his works were much esteemed in Peru." My
+friend supposed the reference was to the writer of tales; but the
+Peruvian had never heard of "Dr. Jekyll"; what he had in his eye, what
+was esteemed in Peru, were the volumes of the engineer.
+
+Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818; the grandson of
+Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, son of
+Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that his nephew, David
+Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of his death in the
+engineership, is the sixth of the family who has held, successively or
+conjointly, that office. The Bell Rock, his father's great triumph, was
+finished before he was born; but he served under his brother Alan in the
+building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and,
+in conjunction with his brother David, he added two--the Chickens and
+Dhu Heartach--to that small number of man's extreme outposts in the
+ocean. Of shore lights, the two brothers last named erected no fewer
+than twenty-seven; of beacons,[6] about twenty-five. Many harbours were
+successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief disaster
+of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved too strong for man's
+arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale
+hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in
+that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-o'-Groat's. In the
+improvement of rivers the brothers were likewise in a large way of
+practice over both England and Scotland, nor had any British engineer
+anything approaching their experience.
+
+It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my
+father's scientific inquiries and inventions centred; these proceeded
+from, and acted back upon, his daily business. Thus it was as a harbour
+engineer that he became interested in the propagation and reduction of
+waves; a difficult subject, in regard to which he has left behind him
+much suggestive matter and some valuable approximate results. Storms
+were his sworn adversaries, and it was through the study of storms that
+he approached that of meteorology at large. Many who knew him not
+otherwise, knew--perhaps have in their gardens--his louvre-boarded
+screen for instruments. But the great achievement of his life was, of
+course, in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination. Fresnel had
+done much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle
+that still seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and
+brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not unnatural
+jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France. It had its hour;
+and, as I have told already, even in France it has blown by. Had it not,
+it would have mattered the less, since all through his life my father
+continued to justify his claim by fresh advances. New apparatus for
+lights in new situations was continually being designed with the same
+unwearied search after perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means; and
+though the holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most
+elegant contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much
+later condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications. The
+number and the value of these improvements entitle their author to the
+name of one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the world a safer
+landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be said: and, first, that
+Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, a sentiment
+of optical laws, and a great intensity of consideration, led him to just
+conclusions; but to calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments
+he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help
+of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate friend,
+_emeritus_ Professor Swan,[7] of St. Andrews, and his later friend,
+Professor P. G. Tait. It is a curious enough circumstance, and a great
+encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped should have
+succeeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks of applied
+science. The second remark is one that applies to the whole family, and
+only particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the great number and
+importance of his inventions: holding as the Stevensons did a Government
+appointment, they regarded their original work as something due already
+to the nation, and none of them has ever taken out a patent. It is
+another cause of the comparative obscurity of the name; for a patent not
+only brings in money, it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father's
+instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are passed
+anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least considerable
+patent would stand out and tell its author's story.
+
+But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, what
+we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion. He was a man
+of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that
+was wholly Scottish, and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound
+essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the
+most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately
+attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults
+of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life's
+troubles. Yet he was a wise adviser; many men, and these not
+inconsiderable, took counsel with him habitually. "I sat at his feet,"
+writes one of these, "when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow
+was set in thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that
+no man could add to the worth of the conclusion." He had excellent
+taste, though whimsical and partial; collected old furniture and
+delighted specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Oscar
+Wilde; took a lasting pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout
+admirer of Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared the taste;
+and though he read little, was constant to his favourite books. He had
+never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had left
+school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say, for
+Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors. The first
+he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, keeping it near him
+in his study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys. Another old
+theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in his hands. When he was
+indisposed, he had two books, "Guy Mannering" and "The Parent's
+Assistant," of which he never wearied. He was a strong Conservative, or,
+as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; except in so far as his views
+were modified by a hot-headed chivalrous sentiment for women. He was
+actually in favour of a marriage law under which any woman might have a
+divorce for the asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same
+sentiment found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh,
+founded and largely supported by himself. This was but one of the many
+channels of his public generosity; his private was equally unstrained.
+The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a
+sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited
+often by his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own
+unworthiness, he would never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice
+was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees. What he
+perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the defence
+of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchison
+Stirling and reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.
+
+His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, too,
+were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for death.
+He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his own character;
+and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy.
+Cases of conscience were sometimes grievous to him, and that delicate
+employment of a scientific witness cost him many qualms. But he found
+respite from these troublesome humours in his work, in his lifelong
+study of natural science, in the society of those he loved, and in his
+daily walks, which now would carry him far into the country with some
+congenial friend, and now keep him dangling about the town from one old
+book-shop to another, and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog
+that passed. His talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much
+freakish humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic,
+was a perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to
+settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and picturesque;
+and when at the beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of
+this power, it was strange and painful to hear him reject one word after
+another as inadequate, and at length desist from the search and leave
+his phrase unfinished rather than finish it without propriety. It was
+perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions,
+passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found
+the most eloquent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger,
+and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what
+we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in
+spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a
+happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at the last
+came to him unaware.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [6] In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw
+    _sub voce_ Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be
+    defined as "a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted."
+
+  [7] William Swan, LL. D., Professor of Natural Philosophy in the
+    University of St. Andrews, 1859-80: born 1818, died 1894.
+
+
+
+
+  X
+
+  TALK AND TALKERS
+
+  Sir, we had a good talk.--JOHNSON.
+
+  As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle
+  silence.--FRANKLIN.
+
+
+  I
+
+There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,
+gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an
+illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of
+time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international
+congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public
+errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by
+day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament
+but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no
+book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance.
+Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good
+talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life,
+freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking,
+comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,
+tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while written
+words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden
+dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the
+truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can
+only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and
+may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of
+the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or
+merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug
+is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary
+groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like
+schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our
+period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak;
+that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the
+harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of
+pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our
+education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any
+age and in almost any state of health.
+
+The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind
+of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot,
+we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a
+fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power
+of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and
+women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival
+mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports
+of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All
+sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and
+selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or
+heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has
+the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and
+hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among
+friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.
+It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy
+that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of
+relations and the sport of life.
+
+A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
+accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company, and
+circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the
+quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not
+that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and
+more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of
+conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying
+where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is
+rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing
+prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing
+in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol or follow
+it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and
+so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be
+reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are
+other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.
+Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal
+lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument;
+asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and
+opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the
+admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of
+ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the
+vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay
+ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we
+swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once
+launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower
+up to the height of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out
+for the heroes, brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their most
+shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with
+words and for a while inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and
+theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast
+with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes
+his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds
+of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a
+moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the _entr'acte_ of an
+afternoon performance, coming forth into the sunshine in a beautiful
+green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the
+music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate _The
+Flying Dutchman_ (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful
+sense of life, warmth, well-being and pride; and the noises of the city,
+voices, bells, and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a
+symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk
+lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within
+you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming around
+you with the colours of the sunset.
+
+Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,
+rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience,
+anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the
+whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter
+in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental
+elevation and abasement--these are the material with which talk is
+fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is
+proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should
+proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should
+keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses
+of men, at the level where history, fiction, and experience intersect
+and illuminate each other. I am I, and you are you, with all my heart;
+but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when,
+instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit
+housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to
+corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the change
+when we leave off to speak of generalities--the bad, the good, the
+miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus--and call up other men, by
+anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature; or, trading on a
+common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the
+hues of life. Communication is no longer by words, but by the instancing
+of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of
+history, in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken
+in quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified,
+change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without
+effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a
+large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to
+the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon,
+Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can
+leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.
+
+Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that
+embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for
+their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically
+human; and even these can only be discussed among their devotees. A
+technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in athletics, art,
+or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on technicalities from such
+rare and happy persons as both know and love their business. No human
+being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes
+me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded
+as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the
+weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in
+language, and far more human both in import and suggestion, than the
+stable features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds and the people
+generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often
+excitingly presented in literature. But the tendency of all living talk
+draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity. Talk is a
+creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last
+resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of
+gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip,
+because it turns on personalities. You can keep no men long, nor
+Scotsmen at all, off moral or theological discussion. These are to all
+the world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities;
+the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which
+they express their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together
+daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in
+cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet
+scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects--theology and love.
+And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines would
+have granted their premisses or welcomed their conclusions.
+
+Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
+private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise,
+and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any
+subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time,
+however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,
+conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an
+exploration. A point arises; the question takes a problematical, a
+baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively
+presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive
+with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first
+utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a
+shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold
+they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's
+cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of
+joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life
+of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far
+apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth;
+and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.
+
+There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to
+fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable
+man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain
+proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable
+adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen
+questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be
+instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on
+equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for
+without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach
+it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein
+pleasure lies.
+
+The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd
+Jack.[8] I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely
+the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth
+man necessary to compound a salad is a madman to mix it: Jack is that
+madman. I know not which is more remarkable: the insane lucidity of his
+conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of
+method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject
+treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles
+like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope,
+transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling
+of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and
+flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror.
+It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack
+it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality, and
+such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence.
+In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with
+moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing
+to compare with the vigour of these impersonations, the strange scale of
+language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major
+Dyngwell--
+
+  "As fast as a musician scatters sounds
+   Out of an instrument--"
+
+the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
+particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence, and bathos,
+each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder
+of their combination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging
+to the same school, is Burly.[9] Burly is a man of a great presence; he
+commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of
+character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could
+be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been
+said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical
+inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of
+talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you
+down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of
+revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both
+conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and
+the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in
+these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end
+arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves
+to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout
+there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear
+although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet
+concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend
+debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of
+transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and
+then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two
+favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues
+that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we
+love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot,
+in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full
+measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat
+from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard
+adventure, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an
+enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery, and manners of its
+own; live a life apart, more arduous, active, and glowing than any real
+existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a
+theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the
+chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the far
+finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated
+poetry, Burly the romantic prose of similar themes; the one glances high
+like a meteor and makes a light in darkness; the other, with many
+changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but
+both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched
+ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of
+contradiction.
+
+Cockshot[10] is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has
+been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry,
+brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point
+about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound
+nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have one
+instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in
+your presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I _should_
+have some theory for that." A blither spectacle than the vigour with
+which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by
+a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas,
+as an athlete bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort. He
+has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic
+gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the
+thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in
+these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable
+even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy--as when idle
+people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour's
+diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours
+of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable wit and
+spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. He
+knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of
+talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a
+thorough "glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his
+adversary. Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.
+Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the
+driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable
+quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred,[11] on the
+other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat
+slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to
+shine in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a
+refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw
+it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often
+instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as
+well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal
+he has his hours of inspiration. Apt words come to him as if by
+accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally,
+they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and
+humour. There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into
+the very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the
+words next his skin, and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of
+particular good things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as
+the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often
+enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; and, between us, on
+this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known
+him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it
+in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life
+with humorous or grave intention, and all the while never hurrying, nor
+flagging, nor taking an unfair advantage of the facts. Jack at a given
+moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly
+just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts
+is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet
+slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating
+but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with his doubts.
+
+Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion
+studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against his
+will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and
+poetic talk of Opalstein.[12] His various and exotic knowledge, complete
+although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of
+language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with
+some, not _quite_ with me--_proxime accessit_, I should say. He sings
+the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and
+music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even
+wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more
+tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the
+Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic
+notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has
+something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and
+he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding
+for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is not truly
+reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his
+members sometimes divides the man's attention. He does not always,
+perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings
+into the talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are
+conscious that he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake
+off the world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise occasional
+disappointments; even an occasional unfairness for his companions, who
+find themselves one day giving too much and the next, when they are wary
+out of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel[13] is in another class
+from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in
+conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of
+which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is
+radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hill-top, and
+from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours. He seems
+not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of interest;
+when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so polished that the
+dull do not perceive it, but so right that the sensitive are silenced.
+True talk should have more body and blood, should be louder, vainer, and
+more declaratory of the man; the true talker should not hold so steady
+an advantage over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason out of a
+score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, when he unbends
+into a strain of graceful gossip, singing like the fireside kettle. In
+these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen
+Anne. I know another person who attains, in his moments, to the
+insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve
+wrote; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric,
+for there is none, alas! to give him answer.
+
+One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that the
+sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of
+common friends. To have their proper weight they should appear in a
+biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good talk is dramatic,
+it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent
+himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk
+where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you
+were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the
+greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason
+that talk depends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce
+Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk
+with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of
+man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes
+out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren
+of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our
+being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we have
+it, and to be grateful for for ever.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [8] Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847-1900).
+
+  [9] W. E. Henley (1849-1903).
+
+  [10] Fleeming Jenkin (1833-85).
+
+  [11] Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, Bart. (1843-98).
+
+  [12] John Addington Symonds (1840-93).
+
+  [13] Mr. Edmund Gosse.
+
+
+
+
+  XI
+
+  TALK AND TALKERS[14]
+
+  II
+
+
+In the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and
+there was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is merely
+luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the
+evening shared by ruminating friends. There is something, aside from
+personal preference, to be alleged in support of this omission. Those
+who are no chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm,
+have a ground in reason for their choice. They get little rest indeed;
+but restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active,
+life is alert, and it is in repose that men prepare themselves for evil.
+On the other hand, they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves and
+others; they have in a high degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity
+displayed and proved; what they get they get upon life's terms, paying
+for it as they go; and once the talk is launched, they are assured of
+honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. The aboriginal
+man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and
+nail for roots and berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar;
+it is like his old primeval days upon the crags, a return to the
+sincerity of savage life from the comfortable fictions of the civilised.
+And if it be delightful to the Old Man, it is none the less profitable
+to his younger brother, the conscientious gentleman. I feel never quite
+sure of your urbane and smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's
+vanities in silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him on to be an
+ass, and send him forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but
+radically more contemptible than when he entered. But if I have a
+flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a point, my
+vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in the course of
+the debate. He will not spare me when we differ; he will not fear to
+demonstrate my folly to my face.
+
+For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered
+society, the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, the
+admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more
+atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious
+ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an
+uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their
+character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are
+silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying
+around them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat
+in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a thrashing, and make better
+intellectual blood. They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a
+glance reminds them of the great eternal law. But it is not so with all.
+Others in conversation seek rather contact with their fellow-men than
+increase of knowledge or clarity of thought. The drama, not the
+philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity. Even
+when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may
+call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart
+of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of
+what delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all
+besides, their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking,
+tangible people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument
+seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed
+countenance, floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him
+to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would
+have conveyed to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so
+superlatively conscious of himself, that if, day after day, he is
+allowed to hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose
+his hold on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a
+god. Talk might be to such an one the very way of moral ruin; the school
+where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous.
+
+This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose. And for
+persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must speak
+with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that
+must be proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend to bully
+them for their good, they must find either an old man, a woman, or some
+one so far below them in the artificial order of society, that courtesy
+may be particularly exercised.
+
+The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly
+closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above
+our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and
+pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in
+their manner--which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called
+a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the
+middle class--serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age
+and add a distinction to grey hairs. But their superiority is founded
+more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the
+march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they
+have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have
+held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and
+harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we
+can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet long before we
+were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or
+woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,
+sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the clear shining
+after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse
+like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective,
+under the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence
+of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before
+them "like a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of
+death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and
+revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in
+the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene marred
+faces are more eloquent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we
+will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken,
+we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.
+
+Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds
+are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain considerations
+overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so
+stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature;
+classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of
+travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt. In virtue, I
+have said, of the speaker's detachment,--and this is why, of two old
+men, the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible
+authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests
+and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men great friends;
+each swore by the other's father; the father of each swore by the other
+lad; and yet each pair, of parent and child, were perpetually by the
+ears. This is typical: it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy.
+
+The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent
+and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look for; it is
+perhaps the more instructive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits
+handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning
+experience with reverted eye; and, chirping and smiling, communicates
+the accidents and reads the lesson of his long career. Opinions are
+strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of
+years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran
+in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still
+quickens his old honest heart--these are "the real long-lived things"
+that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where
+they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his
+heart to beat in tune with his grey-bearded teacher's that a lesson may
+be learned. I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is
+now gathered to his stock--Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and
+author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether
+he was originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew
+him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled
+into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him
+hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not
+for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin--and for
+that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the
+traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by
+Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in
+the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,
+and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could
+not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and
+Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together; but the
+parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and
+he was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits.
+His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it.
+On his last voyage as Commissioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at
+sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking-trumpet,
+ruffling the while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a
+habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was
+puzzling and a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and
+seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore,
+when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have
+pointed with these minute-guns his allocutions to the bench. His humour
+was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism,
+stone, and gravel might have combined their forces against that frail
+tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside
+Jeremy Taylor's "Life of Christ" and greet me with the same open brow,
+the same kind formality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the
+man almost to a decade. He had begun life, under his mother's influence,
+as an admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his
+admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be
+punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotsman,
+that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the
+colloquial, I should certainly be shamed: the remark was apposite, I
+suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; he had
+known the author--known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic
+a contemporary is always something of a trouble. He had the old, serious
+love of the play; had even, as he was proud to tell, played a certain
+part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully
+pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing
+Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great scenic display. A Moderate in
+religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life by a
+conversation with two young lads, revivalists. "H'm," he would say--"new
+to me. I have had--h'm--no such experience." It struck him, not with
+pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as
+he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, should hear these young
+fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought
+the battle of life with,--"and--h'm--not understand." In this wise and
+graceful attitude he did justice to himself and others, reposed unshaken
+in his old beliefs, and recognised their limits without anger or alarm.
+His last recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was after he
+had been arguing against Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted
+by an intolerable pang. "After all," he said, "of all the 'isms, I know
+none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some time
+before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on circuit, for he
+stuck to his duties like a chief part of his existence; and I remember
+it as the only occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with slang--a
+thing he loathed. We were both Roberts; and as we took our places at
+table, he addressed me with a twinkle: "We are just what you would call
+two bob." He offered me port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth;
+spoke of "twenty-shilling notes"; and throughout the meal was full of
+old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like an ancient boy on a holiday.
+But what I recall chiefly was his confession that he had never read
+_Othello_ to an end. Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved
+nothing better than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing
+parallel passages from Shakespeare, passages where the same word was
+employed, or the same idea differently treated. But _Othello_ had beaten
+him. "That noble gentleman and that noble lady--h'm--too painful for
+me." The same night the hoardings were covered with posters, "Burlesque
+of _Othello_," and the contrast blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An
+unforgettable look it gave me into that kind man's soul. His
+acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious education. All the
+humanities were taught in that bare dining-room beside his gouty
+footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was himself the instance
+that pointed and adorned his various talk. Nor could a young man have
+found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, discontent, or any
+of the passions that debase; a life so honest and composed; a soul like
+an ancient violin, so subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in
+music--as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh
+hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.
+
+The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather
+hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and critical
+attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we
+must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin with;
+they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious and infantile
+vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even
+from the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is the
+chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business. The old
+lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after
+years of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack.
+If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity
+of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened
+to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time
+chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It
+requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal
+these stunning corrections among the coxcombs of the young. The pill is
+disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment--if you
+had not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal
+affair--a hyphen, a _trait d'union_, between you and your censor; age's
+philandering, for her pleasure and your good. Incontestably the young
+man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick
+with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The
+correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have
+transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man
+were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment. But
+when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any good
+humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every
+bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and
+reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and
+ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of
+the discipline.
+
+There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened,
+who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind
+of genial cruelty. Still there are some--and I doubt if there be any man
+who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon
+Whitford in "The Egoist" says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it
+stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and
+instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda: his conduct is the conduct of a
+man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he
+remorsefully considers "its astonishing dryness." He is the best of men,
+but the best of women manage to combine all that and something more.
+Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of
+their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the
+proprieties. They can touch a subject and suppress it. The most adroit
+employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they
+wear gloves when they shake hands. But a man has the full responsibility
+of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without
+rudeness, must answer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom
+left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less
+dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of
+Vernon Whitford.
+
+But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not sit
+throned on infirmities like the old; they, are suitors as well as
+sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to
+follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into
+something unworthy of the name. The desire to please, to shine with a
+certain softness of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself,
+banishes from conversation all that is sterling and most of what is
+humorous. As soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to
+flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and
+the commerce of words, consciously or not, becomes secondary to the
+commercing of eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided,
+and a man and woman converse equally and honestly, something in their
+nature or their education falsifies the strain. An instinct prompts them
+to agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ. Should they
+neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, they find
+themselves in different hemispheres. About any point of business or
+conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a woman will speak and
+listen, hear and answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but
+with candour and logical honesty. But if the subject of debate be
+something in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt
+Sally, then may the male debater instantly abandon hope; he may employ
+reason, adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail
+him nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten
+it) she will repeat at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a talk
+between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear
+fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution. The point of
+difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman,
+under a shower of irrelevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by
+the discreet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward
+to the nearest point of safety. And this sort of prestidigitation,
+juggling the dangerous topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced
+with safety in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true
+drawing-room queens.
+
+The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice
+and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them
+from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy;
+their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance;
+their managing arts--the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured
+barbarians--are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify
+relations. It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene
+that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the
+garden, on the road or the hillside, or _tete-a-tete_ and apart from
+interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from any single
+woman; and nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage is one long
+conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they
+but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at
+once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the intervals, almost
+unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is
+turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons
+more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process
+of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new
+worlds of thought.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [14] This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in _The
+    Spectator_.
+
+
+
+
+  XII
+
+  THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
+
+
+The civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a great
+extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal,
+in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares
+the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the
+potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character
+of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns
+him in a byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have
+exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below
+exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent
+has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond
+of dogs, "but in their proper place"; who say "poo' fellow, poo'
+fellow," and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the
+vivisectionist or heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire "the
+creature's instinct"; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to
+resuscitate the theory of animal machines. The "dog's instinct" and the
+"automaton-dog," in this age of psychology and science, sound like
+strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; a machine working
+independently of his control, the heart like the mill-wheel, keeping all
+in motion, and the consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret,
+enjoying the view out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the
+stones; an automaton in one corner of which a living spirit is confined:
+an automaton like man. Instinct again he certainly possesses. Inherited
+aptitudes are his, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views
+and understands, as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he
+came "trailing clouds of glory." But with him, as with man, the field of
+instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; and
+about the far larger part of life both the dog and his master must
+conduct their steps by deduction and observation.
+
+The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before
+the different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak and
+that the other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the
+dog in the development of his intellect. It hinders him from many
+speculations, for words are the beginning of metaphysic. At the same
+blow it saves him from many superstitions, and his silence has won for
+him a higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of
+the dog are many. He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice,
+singularly intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to
+the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth. The day of an
+intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious
+communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye,
+he lies with his protesting paw; and when he rattles his dish or
+scratches at the door his purpose is other than appears. But he has some
+apology to offer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect
+have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by his
+master and himself; yet when a new want arises he must either invent a
+new vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and
+this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the
+sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience,
+and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between formal and
+essential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity
+with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has told and been detected in
+a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog
+of gentlemanly feeling, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The
+canine, like the human, gentleman demands in his misdemeanours
+Montaigne's "_je ne sais quoi de genereux_." He is never more than half
+ashamed of having barked or bitten; and for those faults into which he
+has been led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he
+retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. But to be
+caught lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece.
+
+Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has
+been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of language blunts
+the faculties of man--that because vainglory finds no vent in words,
+creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross
+and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with
+speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we
+had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with
+his whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he
+would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to
+Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their
+own merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready. Hans Christian
+Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top
+to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street
+for shadows of offence--here was the talking dog.
+
+It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into
+his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of
+franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye
+ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and
+patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and
+became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a
+gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole
+race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered, and affected. The
+number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small.
+Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far
+more theatrical than average man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any
+pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit
+of admiration. Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the
+little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a
+few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature
+buried in convention. He will do nothing plainly; but the simplest
+processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an
+elaborate and mysterious etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has
+awakened. But it is not so. Some dogs--some, at the very least--if they
+be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at
+length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game
+explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their
+devotion to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would
+radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate
+and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that both are the
+children of convention.
+
+The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to
+some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members fatally
+precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And the
+converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog,
+moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for
+ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier is to receive
+a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every
+act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the
+dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate
+and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded
+gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the
+dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with
+matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the
+dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and
+perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious
+and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the
+dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the
+whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the
+other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves
+effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we
+might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle
+presented by a school--ushers, monitors, and big and little
+boys--qualified by one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.
+In each we should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and
+somewhat similar points of honour. In each the larger animal keeps a
+contemptuous good humour; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like
+impudence, certain of practical immunity; in each we shall find a double
+life producing double characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism
+combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs,
+and I have known school heroes, that, set aside the fur, could hardly
+have been told apart; and if we desire to understand the chivalry of
+old, we must turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where the
+dogs are trooping.
+
+Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of
+female innocents has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted
+their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a
+romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at
+war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for; and the part
+he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of
+Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial
+situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign
+without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine
+wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was
+somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a little, very
+alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet
+bramble for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes. To the human observer he
+is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems
+abhorrent. A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot
+order, he was born with a nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at
+their hands the most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating
+like a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like
+a regimental banner; and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more,
+when a human lady upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame
+who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one
+hoarse cry and fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the tale of
+a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly,
+in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare
+he would then have written _Troilus and Cressida_ to brand the offending
+sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of
+the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence;
+but he had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral
+suicide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of
+decency, he proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark,
+showing, as it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men;
+and that with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience
+loosens all. "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase,
+"the greatest sinner may return." I have been cheered to see symptoms of
+effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he
+accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I
+begin to hope the period of _Sturm und Drang_ is closed.
+
+All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female
+dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and
+study them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye,
+somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of
+amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, he
+was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter
+over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very
+proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting
+duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be
+neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how
+he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened,
+off posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery,
+saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and
+his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part,
+sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of
+his day--his morning's walk with my father. And, perhaps from this
+cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length
+returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served
+him in another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened
+not long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed
+him with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not
+adore her as he adored my father--although (born snob) he was critically
+conscious of her position as "only a servant"--he still cherished for
+her a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some streets
+away to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same
+situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit
+of a faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem
+with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer content to pay a flying
+visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary
+friend. And so, day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until
+(for some reason which I could never understand and cannot approve) he
+was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit. Here, it is not
+the similarity, it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the
+clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his
+visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy;
+and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so
+destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly
+obedient to the voice of reason.
+
+There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people. But
+the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family.
+Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive
+respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a
+praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble.
+And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own
+blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater
+gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be
+Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of
+levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of
+virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.
+
+I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying
+degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for
+though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp
+what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town,
+there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning
+to--the phrase is technical--to "rake the backets" in a troop. A friend
+of mine, the master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that
+they had left one club and joined another; but whether it was a rise or
+a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than
+he could guess. And this illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real
+life of dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At
+least, in their dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex,
+but of the difference of station. And that in the most snobbish manner;
+for the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and
+keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his
+master. And again, for every station they have an ideal of behaviour, to
+which the master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform.
+How often has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was
+disappointed; and how much more gladly would he not have taken a beating
+than to be thus wounded in the seat of piety!
+
+I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared little or
+nothing for men, with whom he merely co-existed as we do with cattle,
+and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold
+him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I believe, a
+life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question
+in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the
+ancestral type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the
+nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large
+acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street-dog was once
+adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do,
+gambolling in the mud, charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a
+sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into
+society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he
+hunted no more cats; and, conscious of his collar, he ignored his old
+companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognise
+the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was
+alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he
+still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired
+respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to
+condemn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his human brother. And
+thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With
+the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the
+vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout; and they
+live all their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of
+their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among a
+thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay
+upon his conscience; but Woggs,[15] whose soul's shipwreck in the matter
+of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal,
+and has often nobly conquered the temptation. The eighth is his
+favourite commandment. There is something painfully human in these
+unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is
+the bearing of those "stammering professors" in the house of sickness
+and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow
+or other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of
+sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body he
+often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times his
+haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful
+parody or parallel.
+
+I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double
+etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the
+showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of
+home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of
+carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough
+posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her
+master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning
+point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it
+would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read
+the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different
+degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the
+flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their
+favour in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business
+of their lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our
+persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same
+processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right
+against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see
+them with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and
+with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet
+as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to
+solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still
+inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have
+they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from
+courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief
+reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man
+shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an
+art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and
+strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters
+are, in many cases, the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting
+aloft like Louis Quatorze giving and receiving flattery and favour; and
+the dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their true
+existence and become the dupes of their ambition.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [15] Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which
+    last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. Glory was his
+    aim, and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now
+    lies among the treasures of the nation at the British Museum.
+
+
+
+
+  XIII
+
+  A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED
+
+
+These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile Drama.
+That national monument, after having changed its name to Park's, to
+Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has now become,
+for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are
+still afoot, the rest clean vanished. In may be the Museum numbers a
+full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may
+boast their great collections; but to the plain private person they are
+become, like Raphaels, unattainable. I have, at different times,
+possessed _Aladdin_, _The Red Rover_, _The Blind Boy_, _The Old Oak
+Chest_, _The Wood Daemon_, _Jack Sheppard_, _The Miller and his Men_,
+_Der Freischuetz_, _The Smuggler_, _The Forest of Bondy_, _Robin Hood_,
+_The Waterman_, _Richard I._, _My Poll and my Partner Joe_, _The
+Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and _Three-Fingered Jack_, _The Terror of
+Jamaica_; and I have assisted others in the illumination of _The Maid of
+the Inn_ and _The Battle of Waterloo_. In this roll-call of stirring
+names you read the evidences of a happy childhood; and though not half
+of them are still to be procured of any living stationer, in the mind of
+their once happy owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures,
+echoes of the past.
+
+There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
+stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the
+city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a
+party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those
+days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself
+had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith
+Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in
+working order, with a "forest set," a "combat," and a few "robbers
+carousing" in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the
+plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon
+another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets. One
+figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of characters,
+bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I
+would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff,
+2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how--if the name by
+chance were hidden--I would wonder in what play he figured, and what
+immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel! And then to
+go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely
+watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those
+pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests,
+palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults--it was a
+giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a
+loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it
+by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen,
+like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the
+stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we
+were trusted with another; and, incredible as it may sound, used to
+demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or
+with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal
+vacillation, once swept the treasures from before me, with the cry: "I
+do not believe, child, that you are an intending purchaser at all!"
+These were the dragons of the garden; but for such joys of paradise we
+could have faced the Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered
+was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like
+wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare
+with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in
+certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the
+world all vanity. The _crux_ of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the
+uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on these
+bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and touch
+of them which he would jealously prolong; and when at length the deed
+was done, the play selected, and the impatient shopman had brushed the
+rest into the grey portfolio, and the boy was forth again, a little late
+for dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue winter's even,
+and _The Miller_, or _The Rover_, or some kindred drama clutched against
+his side--on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed aloud in
+exultation! I can hear that laughter still. Out of all the years of my
+life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare with these, and that
+was on the night when I brought back with me the "Arabian
+Entertainments" in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the prints.
+I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my
+clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me.
+I grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he said
+he envied me. Ah, well he might!
+
+The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.
+Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable, as
+set forth in the play-book, proved to be unworthy of the scenes and
+characters: what fable would not? Such passages as: "Scene 6. The
+Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of
+stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting
+direction"--such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to
+be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much
+appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. Of _The Blind_
+_Boy_, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince, and once, I
+think, abducted, I know nothing. And _The Old Oak Chest_, what was it
+all about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of
+banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in
+the third act (was it in the third?)--they are all fallen in a
+deliquium, swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.
+
+I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite
+forgive that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to "twopence
+coloured." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it--crimson
+lake!--the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear)--with crimson
+lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for
+cloaks especially, Titian could not equal. The latter colour with
+gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of
+such a savoury greenness that to-day my heart regrets it. Nor can I
+recall without a tender weakness the very aspect of the water where I
+dipped my brush. Yes, there was pleasure in the painting. But when all
+was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled. You might,
+indeed, set up a scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was
+simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry,
+and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance. Two days
+after the purchase the honey had been sucked. Parents used to complain;
+they thought I wearied of my play. It was not so: no more than a person
+can be said to have wearied of his dinner when he leaves the bones and
+dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said grace.
+
+Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study that
+enticing double file of names where poetry, for the true child of Skelt,
+reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen. Much as I have
+travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or
+abstract, names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of memory, and
+are still but names. _The_ _Floating Beacon_--why was that denied me?
+or _The Wreck Ashore? Sixteen-String Jack_, whom I did not even guess to
+be a highwayman, troubled me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is
+one sequence of three from that enchanted calendar that I still at times
+recall, liked a loved verse of poetry: _Lodoiska_, _Silver Palace_,
+_Echo of Westminster Bridge_. Names, bare names, are surely more to
+children than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools remember.
+
+The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the
+charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the
+attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept
+into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest. And now we
+have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt
+appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design
+these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to
+be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature. The
+stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred
+staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking
+of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama; a peculiar
+fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of
+voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon the
+art of Skelt's purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so
+thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and
+incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme hard
+favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the
+villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes
+themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a
+prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other side the
+impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity of
+gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and
+buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the
+ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with
+cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
+
+The scenery of Skeltdom--or, shall we say, the kingdom of
+Transpontus?--had a prevailing character. Whether it set forth Poland as
+in _The Blind Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or Italy
+with _The Old Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus. A botanist could
+tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all-pervasive, running wild in
+deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and overshadowing
+these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus Skeltica_--brave
+growths. The graves were all embowelled in the Surrey-side formation;
+the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to
+be sure, had yet another, an Oriental string: he held the gorgeous East
+in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the
+Hotel des Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But
+on these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the
+Occidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had a strong flavour
+of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and drop-scenes, and
+I am bound to say was charming. How the roads wander, how the castle
+sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind the cloud, and how
+the congregated clouds themselves uproll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is
+the cottage interior, the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the
+nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and powder-horn and
+corner-cupboard; here is the inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee
+Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes,
+spittoons, and eight-day clock; and there again is that impressive
+dungeon with the chains, which was so dull to colour. England, the
+hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the
+navigable Thames--England, when at last I came to visit it, was only
+Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come
+home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all
+foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen
+years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and
+thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating
+pure romance--still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the
+original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the
+bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of
+Jonathan Wild, pl. 1. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon
+some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the
+world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my
+immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world;
+but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see
+a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold
+scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly
+a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree--that set-piece--I seem
+to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull,
+swaggering, obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very
+spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I
+was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der
+Freischuetz_ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes;
+acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent
+theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took
+from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader--and
+yourself?
+
+A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73
+Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage
+favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest
+readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly, or the
+bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's or to Clarke's of Garrick
+Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient
+aspirations: _The Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I cherish
+the belief that when these shall see once more the light of day, B.
+Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at
+times that is not all a dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly
+street--E.W., I think, the postal district--close below the fool's cap
+of St. Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey
+Bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue
+and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt
+himself, the aboriginal, all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with what a
+choking heart--I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I pay my mental
+money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.
+
+
+
+
+  XIV
+
+  A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
+
+
+The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we
+admire the most; we choose and we revisit them for many and various
+reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or two of Scott's
+novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, "The Egoist," and the "Vicomte
+de Bragelonne," form the inner circle of my intimates. Behind these
+comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; "The Pilgrim's Progress" in
+the front rank, "The Bible in Spain" not far behind. There are besides a
+certain number that look at me with reproach as I pass them by on my
+shelves: books that I once thumbed and studied: houses which were once
+like home to me, but where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms
+(and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns, and Hazlitt.
+Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of
+brilliancy--glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into
+insignificance until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and
+frown on me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but
+
+  "Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,"
+
+must have stood in the first company with the six names of my continual
+literary intimates. To these six, incongruous as they seem, I have long
+been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of death. I have never
+read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not like to be long without
+reading some of him, and my delight in what I do read never lessens. Of
+Shakespeare I have read all but _Richard_ _III._, _Henry VI._, _Titus
+Andronicus_, and _All's Well that Ends Well_; and these, having already
+made all suitable endeavour, I now know that I shall never read--to make
+up for which unfaithfulness I could read much of the rest for ever. Of
+Moliere--surely the next greatest name of Christendom--I could tell a
+very similar story; but in a little corner of a little essay these
+princes are too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and
+pass on. How often I have read "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy," or
+"Redgauntlet," I have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it
+is either four or five times that I have read "The Egoist," and either
+five or six that I have read the "Vicomte de Bragelonne."
+
+Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent
+so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the
+last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but
+the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the "Vicomte" began,
+somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage
+of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The
+name of d'Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend,
+for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first
+perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time
+out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I
+understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is
+of the execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot--a strange testimony to the
+dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de
+Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My next
+reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I
+would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the
+shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly
+retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down
+with the "Vicomte" for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the
+fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened
+with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and
+such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I
+gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind
+aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scottish
+garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I
+would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was
+so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as
+a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding
+with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my
+slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book
+again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn
+to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so
+charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real,
+perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan.
+
+Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my
+favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me call it
+my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously
+than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in
+these six volumes. Perhaps I think that d'Artagnan delights to have me
+read of him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a
+look, and Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me
+with his best graces, as to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I am
+not careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV. about
+the battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the "Vicomte" one of the
+first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works. At least, I avow
+myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the "Vicomte"
+with that of "Monte Cristo," or its own elder brother, the "Trois
+Mousquetaires," I confess I am both pained and puzzled.
+
+To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero in
+the pages of "Vingt Ans Apres," perhaps the name may act as a deterrent.
+A man might well stand back if he supposed he were to follow, for six
+volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and withal so dreary a
+cavalier as Bragelonne. But the fear is idle. I may be said to have
+passed the best years of my life in these six volumes, and my
+acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who
+has so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered to pretend to be
+dead, I am sometimes reminded of a saying in an earlier volume: "_Enfin,
+dit Miss Stewart_,"--and it was of Bragelonne she spoke--"_enfin il a
+fait quelquechose: c'est, ma foi! bien heureux_." I am reminded of it,
+as I say; and the next moment, when Athos dies of his death, and my dear
+d'Artagnan bursts into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my
+flippancy.
+
+Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader of "Vingt Ans Apres" is
+inclined to flee. Well, he is right there too, though not so right.
+Louise is no success. Her creator has spared no pains; she is
+well-meant, not ill-designed, sometimes has a word that rings out true;
+sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage our sympathies. But
+I have never envied the King his triumph. And so far from pitying
+Bragelonne for his defeat, I could wish him no worse (not for lack of
+malice, but imagination) than to be wedded to that lady. Madame enchants
+me; I can forgive that royal minx her most serious offences; I can
+thrill and soften with the King on that memorable occasion when he goes
+to upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it comes to the "_Allons,
+aimez-moi donc_," it is my heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche.
+Not so with Louise. Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an
+author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for
+nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her
+mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall
+from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before
+us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping
+market-woman. Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will too often
+start the trick of "getting ugly"; and no disease is more difficult to
+cure. I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in
+particular, with whose works I am very well acquainted, though I cannot
+read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside
+his ailing puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore
+them to youth and beauty. There are others who ride too high for these
+misfortunes. Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not
+more lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn,
+Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names, the
+daughters of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and I
+am at her knees. Ah! these are the creators of desirable women. They
+would never have fallen in the mud with Dumas and poor La Valliere. It
+is my only consolation that not one of all of them, except the first,
+could have plucked at the moustache of d'Artagnan.
+
+Or perhaps, again, a portion of readers stumble at the threshold. In so
+vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs and kitchen offices
+where no one would delight to linger; but it was at least unhappy that
+the vestibule should be so badly lighted; and until, in the seventeenth
+chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, I must confess, the
+book goes heavily enough. But, from thenceforward, what a feast is
+spread! Monk kidnapped; d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; the ever
+delectable adventure of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits d'Artagnan,
+with its epilogue (vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the
+moral superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St.
+Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes,
+and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at the
+Bastille; the night talk in the forest of Senart; Belle Isle again, with
+the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of d'Artagnan
+the untamable, under the lash of the young King. What other novel has
+such epic variety and nobility of incident? often, if you will,
+impossible; often of the order of an Arabian story; and yet all based in
+human nature. For if you come to that, what novel has more human nature?
+not studied with the microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight,
+with the natural eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and
+wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose,
+must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But
+there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong
+as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with
+every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right.
+And, once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is inspired
+with a more unstrained or a more wholesome morality?
+
+Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of d'Artagnan
+only to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of the man, I have to add
+morality. There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the
+world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people who have dipped into
+Sir Richard Burton's "Thousand and One Nights," one shall have been
+offended by the animal details; another to whom these were harmless,
+perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the
+rascality and cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again, one
+shall have been pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one by
+that of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." And the point is that neither need
+be wrong. We shall always shock each other both in life and art; we
+cannot get the sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there
+be such a thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer
+some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in
+the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity.
+I would scarce send to the "Vicomte" a reader who was in quest of what
+we may call puritan morality. The ventripotent mulatto, the great eater,
+worker, earner and waster, the man of much and witty laughter, the man
+of the great heart, and alas! of the doubtful honesty, is a figure not
+yet clearly set before the world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial
+portrait; but with whatever art that may be touched, and whatever
+indulgence, it will not be the portrait of a precisian. Dumas was
+certainly not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he put into the
+mouth of d'Artagnan's old servant this excellent profession: "_Monsieur,
+j'etais une de ces bonnes pates d'hommes que Dieu a faits pour s'animer
+pendant un certain temps et pour trouver bonnes toutes choses qui
+accompagnent leur sejour sur la terre._" He was thinking, as I say, of
+Planchet, to whom the words are aptly fitted; but they were fitted also
+to Planchet's creator; and perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for
+observe what follows: "_D'Artagnan s'assit alors pres de la fenetre, et,
+cette philosophie de Planchet lui ayant paru solide, il y reva._" In a
+man who finds all things good, you will scarce expect much zeal for
+negative virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him;
+abstinence, however wise, however kind, will always seem to such a judge
+entirely mean and partly impious. So with Dumas. Chastity is not near
+his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of frugality which
+is the armour of the artist. Now, in the "Vicomte," he had much to do
+with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert. Historic justice should be all
+upon the side of Colbert, of official honesty, and fiscal competence.
+And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his knowledge;
+once it is but flashed upon us, and received with the laughter of
+Fouquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint
+Mande; once it is touched on by Aramis in the forest of Senart; in the
+end, it is set before us clearly in one dignified speech of the
+triumphant Colbert. But in Fouquet, the waster, the lover of good cheer
+and wit and art, the swift transactor of much business, "_l'homme de
+bruit, l'homme de plaisir, l'homme qui n'est que parceque les autres
+sont_," Dumas saw something of himself and drew the figure the more
+tenderly. It is to me even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's
+honour; not seeing, you might think, that unflawed honour is impossible
+to spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life,
+seeing it too well, and clinging the more to what was left. Honour can
+survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a member. The man
+rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the ruins of
+the old; and when his sword is broken, he will do valiantly with his
+dagger. So it is with Fouquet in the book; so it was with Dumas on the
+battlefield of life.
+
+To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man;
+but perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called morality in the
+writer. And it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d'Artagnan, that
+we must look for that spirit of morality, which is one of the chief
+merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets
+it high above more popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has
+declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless
+creed; but d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind, and
+upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the
+copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine,
+natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district
+visitor--no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all
+refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings true like a
+good sovereign. Readers who have approached the "Vicomte," not across
+country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed avenue of the
+"Mousquetaires" and "Vingt Ans Apres," will not have forgotten
+d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick upon Milady.
+What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how agreeable a lesson,
+to see the old captain humble himself to the son of the man whom he had
+personated! Here, and throughout, if I am to choose virtues for myself
+or my friends, let me choose the virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say
+there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is
+none that I love so wholly. There are many spiritual eyes that seem to
+spy upon our actions--eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine
+to behold us in our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to
+offend: our witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should
+think me childish, I must count my d'Artagnan--not d'Artagnan of the
+memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer--a preference, I take the
+freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan of flesh
+and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but Dumas's. And
+this is the particular crown and triumph of the artist--not to be true
+merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.
+
+There is yet another point in the "Vicomte" which I find incomparable. I
+can recall no other work of the imagination in which the end of life is
+represented with so nice a tact. I was asked the other day if Dumas ever
+made me either laugh or cry. Well, in this my late fifth reading of the
+"Vicomte" I did laugh once at the small Coquelin de Voliere business,
+and was perhaps a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for
+it, I smiled continually. But for tears, I do not know. If you put a
+pistol to my throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy
+foot--within a measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like
+the big guns to be discharged and the great passions to appear
+authentically, it may even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to
+me; I cannot count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with
+those I love; and, above all, in this last volume, I find a singular
+charm of spirit. It breathes a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always
+brave, never hysterical. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this long tale,
+evening gradually falls; and the lights are extinguished, and the heroes
+pass away one by one. One by one they go, and not a regret embitters
+their departure; the young succeed them in their places, Louis Quatorze
+is swelling larger and shining broader, another generation and another
+France dawn on the horizon; but for us and these old men whom we have
+loved so long, the inevitable end draws near, and is welcome. To read
+this well is to anticipate experience. Ah, if only when these hours of
+the long shadows fall for us in reality and not in figure, we may hope
+to face them with a mind as quiet!
+
+But my paper is running out; the siege-guns are firing on the Dutch
+frontier! and I must say adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade
+fallen on the field of glory. _Adieu_--rather _au revoir_! Yet a sixth
+time, dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take horse together
+for Belle Isle.
+
+
+
+
+  XV
+
+  A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
+
+
+In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself
+should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt
+clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with
+the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of
+continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run
+thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if
+it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
+It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our
+books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence
+and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush
+aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig
+for truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside
+inn where, "towards the close of the year 17----," several gentlemen in
+three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the
+Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a
+scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he,
+to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping
+fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than
+the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the
+brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I
+can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane;
+night and the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings
+of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "post-chaise," the "great
+North Road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like poetry. One
+and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read
+story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but
+for some quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere
+bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was welcome in its place,
+the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different
+from either. My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still
+remember four different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with
+the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to
+be the admirable opening of "What will He Do with It": it was no wonder
+that I was pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified.
+One is a little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and
+people groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open
+door of a sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in
+a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the
+figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental
+impression I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to
+the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling
+with his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and
+witnessed the horrors of a wreck.[16] Different as they are, all these
+early favourites have a common note--they have all a touch of the
+romantic.
+
+Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The
+pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts--the active and the
+passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon
+we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we
+know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our conduct, anon
+merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of
+these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is
+surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but
+I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both
+which is not immoral, but simply non-moral; which either does not regard
+the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy
+relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to
+do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and
+hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of
+the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of
+arms, or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is
+impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on
+moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human
+conscience. But it is possible to build, upon this ground, the most
+joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.
+
+One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and
+places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there.
+One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long
+rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of
+lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls
+up in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we
+feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.
+And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain
+attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts
+of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep surroundings,
+particularly torture and delight me. Something must have happened in
+such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I
+was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I
+still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some
+places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder;
+certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart
+for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive
+and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with
+its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river--though it is
+known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his "Endymion" and
+Nelson parted from his Emma--still seems to wait the coming of the
+appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old green
+shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old
+"Hawes Inn" at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.
+There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of
+its own, half inland, half marine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the
+tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden
+with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and
+Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of "The Antiquary." But you
+need not tell me--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or
+not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.
+So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and
+inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some
+quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many of
+these romances have we not seen determined at their birth; how many
+people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once
+into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn near,
+with express intimations--"here my destiny awaits me"--and we have but
+dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in
+a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that
+should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night
+and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and
+suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour
+had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the
+Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a
+horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green
+shutters of the inn at Burford.[17]
+
+Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively
+literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added
+the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit
+and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell,
+himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play;
+and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once
+enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative
+writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of
+common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but
+their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and
+to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should
+fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should
+follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but
+all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in
+music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a
+picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some
+attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an
+illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting
+over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian
+running with his fingers in his ears,--these are each culminating
+moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for
+ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they
+are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it
+was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the
+last mark of truth upon a story, and fill up, at one blow, our capacity
+for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind
+that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This,
+then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought,
+or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to
+the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words;
+the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and
+the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared
+with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical
+or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution,
+and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford,
+or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to
+seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a
+legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting
+logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite
+another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet.
+The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is
+likewise art.
+
+English people of the present day[18] are apt, I know not why, to look
+somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of
+teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a
+novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced
+even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the
+art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of
+monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of "Sandy's Mull,"
+preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people
+work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's
+inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But
+even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer.
+Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in
+the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived,
+fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon
+Crawley's blow were not delivered, "Vanity Fair" would cease to be a
+work of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the
+discharge of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward and consolation of
+the reader. The end of "Esmond" is a yet wider excursion from the
+author's customary fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the
+great and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the great,
+unblushing French thief; as usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and
+the breaking of the sword rounds off the best of all his books with a
+manly martial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the
+necessity for marking incident than to compare the living fame of
+"Robinson Crusoe" with the discredit of "Clarissa Harlowe." "Clarissa"
+is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great canvas,
+with inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains wit, character,
+passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters
+sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be
+somewhat frigid and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the
+only note of what we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and
+Byron himself. And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not
+a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring
+none of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of
+love, goes on from edition to edition, ever young, while "Clarissa" lies
+upon the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was
+twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a
+chapter of "Robinson" read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he
+had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another
+man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and
+printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure.
+Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to
+borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but
+one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at
+length, and with entire delight, read "Robinson." It is like the story
+of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter from "Clarissa," would he have
+been fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet "Clarissa" has
+every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted--pictorial
+or picture-making romance. While "Robinson" depends, for the most part
+and with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of
+circumstance.
+
+In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the
+pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together, by a
+common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion
+clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres
+indissolubly with the other. This is high art; and not only the highest
+art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the
+greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. Such
+are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as
+from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are
+ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or
+subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally
+loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights
+in age--I mean the "Arabian Nights"--where you shall look in vain for
+moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us
+among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen.
+Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment
+and is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to
+these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his
+romances. The early part of "Monte Cristo," down to the finding of the
+treasure, is a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed
+who shared these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a
+thing of packthread and Dantes little more than a name. The sequel is
+one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural, and dull; but as for
+these early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant
+where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is
+very thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but it is brisk
+and clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, with envy, an
+old and very clever lady setting forth on a second or third voyage into
+"Monte Cristo." Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader,
+which can be reperused at any age, and where the characters are no more
+than puppets. The bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; their
+springs are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies
+filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures.
+And the point may be illustrated still further. The last interview
+between Lucy and Richard Feverel is pure drama; more than that, it is
+the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. Their
+first meeting by the river, on the other hand, is pure romance; it has
+nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy and
+maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change. And yet I think
+he would be a bold man who should choose between these passages. Thus,
+in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its order: in
+the one, human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine
+voice; in the second, according circumstances, like instruments in tune,
+shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such as we love to
+prefigure for ourselves; and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may
+hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more
+genius--I do not say it does; but at least the other dwells as clearly
+in the memory.
+
+True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into
+the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most
+pedestrian realism. "Robinson Crusoe" is as realistic as it is romantic;
+both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does
+romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal
+with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is
+to conjure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the
+disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa is a
+very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from
+beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of
+adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember
+rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising.
+Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is "a joy for
+ever" to the man who reads of them. They are the things that should be
+found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of
+the same interest the other day in a new book, "The Sailor's
+Sweetheart," by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig
+_Morning Star_ is very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the
+clothes, the books, and the money satisfy the reader's mind like things
+to eat. We are dealing here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate
+interest of treasure-trove. But even treasure-trove can be made dull.
+There are few people who have not groaned under the plethora of goods
+that fell to the lot of the "Swiss Family Robinson," that dreary family.
+They found article after article, creature after creature, from
+milk-kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no informing
+taste had presided over the selection, there was no smack or relish in
+the invoice; and these riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods in
+Verne's "Mysterious Island" is another case in point: there was no gusto
+and no glamour about that; it might have come from a shop. But the two
+hundred and seventy-eight Australian sovereigns on board the _Morning
+Star_ fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of
+secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from that
+discovery, as they radiate from a striking particular in life; and I was
+made for the moment as happy as a reader has the right to be.
+
+To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in
+mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art produces
+illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and
+while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely
+clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to
+take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the
+triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at
+being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in character-studies the
+pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at
+incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage,
+suffering, or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are
+not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they
+stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our
+place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or
+with Eugene de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common
+with them. It is not character but incident that wooes us out of our
+reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves;
+some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in
+the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the
+characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in
+our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only,
+do we say we have been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable
+things that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we
+are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which
+it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded, or calumniated.
+It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in
+which every incident, detail, and trick of circumstance shall be welcome
+to the reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to
+the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his
+life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it
+with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves
+to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight,
+fiction is called romance.
+
+Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. "The Lady of the
+Lake" has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness
+and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would
+make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through
+just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells
+undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the
+mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside,
+the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green
+possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, "The Lady of the Lake,"
+or that direct, romantic opening--one of the most spirited and poetical
+in literature--"The stag at eve had drunk his fill." The same strength
+and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that
+ill-written, ragged book, "The Pirate," the figure of Cleveland--cast up
+by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness--moving, with the
+blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple
+islanders--singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland
+mistress--is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention.
+The words of his song, "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene
+and by such a lover, clinch, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast
+upon which the tale is built. In "Guy Mannering," again, every incident
+is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands
+at Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method.
+
+"'I remember the tune well,' he says,'though I cannot guess what should
+at present so strongly recall it to my memory.' He took his flageolet
+from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke
+the corresponding associations of a damsel.... She immediately took up
+the song--
+
+  "'Are these the links of Forth, she said;
+      Or are they the crooks of Dee,
+    Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head
+      That I so fain would see?'
+
+"'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.'"
+
+On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of
+modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the
+old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's idea
+of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, were something
+strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg's
+appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the
+scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the
+four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is
+laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The reader will
+observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is
+how it runs in the original: "a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring
+about half-way down the descent and which had once supplied the castle
+with water, was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who gave in such copy
+would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten
+to prepare the reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten
+to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to
+face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams
+all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is
+not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative
+besides.
+
+Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong
+light upon the subject of this paper. For here we have a man of the
+finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the
+romantic junctures of his story: and we find him utterly careless,
+almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style, and
+not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In
+character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scots, he was delicate,
+strong, and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of
+his heroes have already wearied three generations of readers. At times
+his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety--with a
+true heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily
+forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man
+who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the
+Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only
+splendid romantic but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he
+could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? It seems
+to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his
+surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they
+play to him. He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and
+humorous visions, but hardly a great artist. He conjured up the romantic
+with delight, but had hardly patience to describe it. Of the pleasures
+of his art he tasted fully; but of its cares and scruples and distresses
+never man knew less.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [16] Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of
+    Charles Kingsley.
+
+  [17] Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat
+    with my own hands in "Kidnapped." Some day, perhaps, I may try a
+    rattle at the shutters.
+
+  [18] 1882.
+
+
+
+
+  XVI
+
+  A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE[19]
+
+
+  I
+
+We have recently[20] enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in some
+detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. Walter Besant
+and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very different calibre; Mr.
+James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of
+finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and
+humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate
+artist, Mr. Besant the impersonation of good-nature. That such doctors
+should differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in which they
+seem to agree fills me, I confess, with wonder. For they are both
+content to talk about the "art of fiction"; and Mr. Besant, waxing
+exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to
+the "art of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the
+art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of
+prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call
+by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present,
+at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom
+present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic.
+Fiction is in the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element
+which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer,
+Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet
+I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these
+two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting
+lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then,
+regarded as a definition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me
+suggest another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant
+had in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative.
+
+But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English novel,"
+the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most
+pleasing novel on that roll, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," the
+desire is natural enough. I can conceive then, that he would hasten to
+propose two additions, and read thus: the art of _fictitious_ narrative
+_in prose_.
+
+Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be
+denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded
+lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature;
+but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to
+build our definitions on some more fundamental ground than binding. Why,
+then, are we to add "in prose"? "The Odyssey" appears to me the best of
+romances; "The Lady of the Lake" to stand high in the second order; and
+Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of
+the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a
+narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the
+long period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the
+principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice
+of a noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration
+in the same way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured
+verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of
+dialogue, and a more picked and stately strain of words. If you are to
+refuse "Don Juan," it is hard to see why you should include "Zanoni" or
+(to bracket works of very different value) "The Scarlet Letter"; and by
+what discrimination are you to open your doors to "The Pilgrim's
+Progress" and close them on "The Faery Queen"? To bring things closer
+home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called
+"Paradise Lost" was written in English verse by one John Milton; what
+was it then? It was next translated by Chateaubriand into French prose;
+and what was it then? Lastly, the French translation was, by some
+inspired compatriot of George Gilfillan (and of mine), turned bodily
+into an English novel; and, in the name of clearness, what was it then?
+
+But, once more, why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is
+obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want
+for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is
+applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or
+of an imaginary series. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (a work of cunning
+and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manoeuvres as
+(let us say) "Tom Jones": the clear conception of certain characters of
+man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents out of a great
+number that offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation
+of a certain key in dialogue. In which these things are done with the
+more art--in which the greater air of nature--readers will differently
+judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very special case, and almost a generic;
+but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every biography with any salt of
+life, it is in every history where events and men, rather than ideas,
+are presented--in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay--that
+the novelist will find many of his own methods most conspicuously and
+adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, who is free--who has the
+right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more
+precious still, of wholesale omission--is frequently defeated, and, with
+all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and
+passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervour on the
+sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination truth
+will seem a word of very debateable propriety, not only for the labours
+of the novelist, but for those of the historian. No art--to use the
+daring phrase of Mr. James--can successfully "compete with life"; and
+the art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish _montibus aviis_.
+Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most
+various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the
+ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to the touch--so thrillingly
+delicate, and to the belly--so imperious when starved. It combines and
+employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art
+only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few
+of life's majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of
+light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of
+incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture, and
+agony, with which it teems. To "compete with life," whose sun we cannot
+look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us--to compete
+with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire,
+the bitterness of death and separation--here is, indeed, a projected
+escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress
+coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed
+with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
+insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense; none can "compete with
+life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these
+facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of
+the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised and justly
+commend the author's talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for a
+last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every
+case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience,
+even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience
+itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.
+
+What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the
+source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does "compete with
+life." Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut
+his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like
+arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured
+and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary
+abstraction. Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in
+nature: asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand
+upon its mouth. So with the arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine
+and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up
+relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme
+of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the
+mood of narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues
+instead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all,
+it imitates not life but speech; not the facts of human destiny, but the
+emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them.
+The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who
+told their stories round the savage campfire. Our art is occupied, and
+bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making
+them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as
+in marshalling all of them towards a common end. For the welter of
+impressions, all forcible but all discrete, which life presents, it
+substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most
+feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of
+the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or
+like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters, from
+all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and
+re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every
+incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in
+unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another
+way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller
+without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant;
+a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational,
+flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
+thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience,
+like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of
+geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a
+fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both
+untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.
+The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to
+life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of
+leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, a difference
+which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the
+meaning of the work.
+
+The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible
+magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these is
+legion; and with each new subject--for here again I must differ by the
+whole width of heaven from Mr. James--the true artist will vary his
+method and change the point of attack. That which was in one case an
+excellence, will become a defect in another; what was the making of one
+book, will in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and
+then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for
+instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the
+novel of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite
+illogical tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which
+appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles and mingled
+and inconstant motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with
+the same stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional
+nature and moral judgment.
+
+And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James refers, with singular
+generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden
+treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In
+this book he misses what he calls the "immense luxury" of being able to
+quarrel with his author. The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our
+judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake,
+and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the
+volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. James's reason. He
+cannot criticise the author, as he goes, "because," says he, comparing
+it with another work, "_I have been a child, but I have never been on a
+quest for buried treasure_." Here, is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if
+he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated
+that he has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master
+James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander,
+and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck
+and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly
+retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and
+beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent
+reason against too narrow a conception of experience; for the born
+artist, he contends, the "faintest hints of life" are converted into
+revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of
+cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those things
+which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has done. Desire
+is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it
+is true that neither Mr. James nor the author of the work in question
+has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone questing after gold, it is probable
+that both have ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of such
+a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and
+well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this class of interest,
+having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten
+road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to
+the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character
+to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of
+wide trousers and a liberal complement of pistols. The author, for the
+sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more or less grown
+up, admitted character, within certain limits, into his design; but only
+within certain limits. Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of
+another sort, they had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this
+elementary novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with
+but one class of qualities--the warlike and formidable. So as they
+appear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served
+their end. Danger is the matter with which this class of novel deals;
+fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are
+portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke
+the sympathy of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the
+hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of
+material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The
+stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose the
+scent.
+
+The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it
+requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of
+"Gil Blas," it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It turns on
+the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied
+in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being tributary, need not
+march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown. As
+they enter, so they may go out; they must be consistent, but they need
+not grow. Here Mr. James will recognise the note of much of his own
+work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying
+it at rest or only gently moved; and, with his usual delicate and just
+artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions which would deform
+the attitudes he loves to study, and change his sitters from the
+humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more
+emotional moments. In his recent "Author of Beltraffio," so just in
+conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed
+employed; but observe that it is not displayed. Even in the heroine the
+working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true
+tragedy, the _scene a faire_, passes unseen behind the panels of a
+locked door. The delectable invention of the young visitor is
+introduced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his
+method, might avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose
+me guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it
+belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very
+differently conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked
+class, of which I now proceed to speak.
+
+I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it
+enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly English
+misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of
+incident. It consists of passion, which gives the actor his opportunity;
+and that passion must progressively increase, or the actor, as the piece
+proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a
+higher pitch of interest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore
+be founded on one of the passionate _cruces_ of life, where duty and
+inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I
+call, for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy
+specimens, all of our own day and language: Meredith's "Rhoda Fleming,"
+that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,[21] and hunted for
+at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's "Pair of Blue Eyes"; and two of
+Charles Reade's, "Griffith Gaunt" and "The Double Marriage," originally
+called "White Lies," and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to
+my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In
+this kind of novel the closed door of "The Author of Beltraffio" must be
+broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last
+word; passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution,
+the protagonist and the _deus ex machina_ in one. The characters may
+come anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before
+they leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of
+themselves by passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with
+detail; to depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and
+change in the furnace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the
+sort; nice portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept
+mere abstract types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of
+this class may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it
+may be great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart
+and the impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the
+second class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue
+has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind directed
+to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the
+novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre.
+A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead
+of a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be
+plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in "Rhoda
+Fleming," Mrs. Lovel raises such resentment in the reader; her motives
+are too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength
+of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when
+Balzac, after having begun the "Duchesse de Langeais" in terms of strong
+if somewhat swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the
+hero's clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of
+character; they are out of place in the high society of the passions;
+when the passions are introduced in art at their full height, we look to
+see them, not baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but towering
+above circumstance and acting substitutes for fate.
+
+And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene. To
+much of what I have said he would apparently demur; in much he would,
+somewhat impatiently, acquiesce. It may be true; but it is not what he
+desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its
+worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light. He
+uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with
+the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point,
+I may reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful
+advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much be
+helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest,
+as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms. The best that
+we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character
+or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an
+illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it
+a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as
+sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of
+the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag below the level of the
+argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men
+talk in parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may
+be called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative, nor
+any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that
+is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of
+the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it
+will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but
+to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he
+keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care
+particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material
+detail of the day's manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the
+environment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent,
+and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the
+better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this
+age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the
+great books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and
+before Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind
+that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its
+exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand
+or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in great men,
+working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their
+complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that
+simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their
+excellence.
+
+
+  II
+
+Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the
+lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none
+ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and those
+of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave,
+the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in art like what there
+is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead; he thinks a
+form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange
+forgetfulness of the history of the race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his
+own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of
+this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor little
+orthodoxies of the day--no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday
+or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are
+exclusive--the living quality of much that he has done is of a contrary,
+I had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A man, as I read him, of
+an originally strong romantic bent--a certain glow of romance still
+resides in many of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by
+accident he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as
+often as not, that his reader rejoices--justly, as I contend. For in all
+this excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central
+human thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I mean
+himself? A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances
+of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and
+aspirations than those he loves to draw. And why should he suppress
+himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The obvious is not
+of necessity the normal; fashion rules and deforms; the majority fall
+tamely into the contemporary shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the
+true observer, only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is
+lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw the null, and
+write the novel of society instead of the romance of man.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [19] This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is
+    reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last.--R. L. S.
+
+  [20] 1884.
+
+  [21] Now no longer so, thank Heaven!
+
+
+
+
+  MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN F.R.S., LL.D.
+
+
+
+
+  PREFACE[22]
+
+
+On the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to
+publish a selection of his various papers; by way of introduction, the
+following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable
+volumes, has been issued in England. In the States, it has not been
+thought advisable to reproduce the whole; and the memoir appearing
+alone, shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its
+justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to
+a stranger out of all proportion. But Jenkin was a man much more
+remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him. It was
+in the world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude
+towards life, by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort,
+that he struck the minds of his contemporaries. His was an individual
+figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the
+pages of a novel. His was a face worth painting for its own sake. If the
+sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin, after
+his death, shall not continue to make new friends, the fault will be
+altogether mine.
+
+                                                              R. L. S.
+
+  _Saranac, Oct. 1887._
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [22] First printed in England in 1907.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+  MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN
+
+
+
+
+  CHAPTER I
+
+   The Jenkins of Stowting--Fleeming's grandfather--Mrs. Buckner's
+   fortune--Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King
+   Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career--The
+   Campbell-Jacksons--Fleeming's mother--Fleeming's uncle John.
+
+
+In the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to
+come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans,
+are found reputably settled in the county of Kent. Persons of strong
+genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in
+1555, to his contemporary "John Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver
+General of the County," and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the
+proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree--a prince; "Guaith Voeth, Lord of
+Cardigan," the name and style of him. It may suffice, however, for the
+present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
+Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew
+to wealth and consequence in their new home.
+
+Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was
+William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but
+no less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century and a half, a
+Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry or Robert) sat in the same place of
+humble honour. Of their wealth we know that, in the reign of Charles I.,
+Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying land,
+and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court. This was an
+estate of some 320 acres, six miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and
+Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown _in
+capite_ by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage
+of the sea at Sandgate. It had a chequered history before it fell into
+the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to
+another--to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to
+Pavelys, Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and
+Clarkes; a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be
+no man's home. But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin
+family in Kent; and though passed on from brother to brother, held in
+shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and jointures, and
+at least once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the
+hands of the direct line. It is not my design, nor have I the necessary
+knowledge, to give a history of this obscure family. But this is an age
+when genealogy has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first
+time a human science; so that we no longer study it in quest of the
+Guaith Voeths, but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and
+destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of
+Mr. Galton. Not only do our character and talents lie upon the anvil and
+receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our life's
+story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the
+man is only an episode in the epic of the family. From this point of
+view I ask the reader's leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man
+who was my friend, with the accession of his great-grandfather, John
+Jenkin.
+
+This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
+"Westward Ho!" was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
+Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been long
+enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
+themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
+connection is singularly involved. John and his wife were each descended
+in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
+brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York. John's mother had
+married a Frewen for a second husband. And the last complication was to
+be added by the Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner,
+Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
+cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's
+wife, and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs.
+Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
+life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
+Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
+insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
+immediate circle, was in her old age "a great genealogist of all Sussex
+families, and much consulted." The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
+seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
+such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name the family
+was ruined.
+
+The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
+unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
+living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example
+of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
+jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
+fruits of the neighbourhood; and, like all the family, very choice in
+horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle-horse, Captain
+(for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family chronicle
+which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as the
+vicar's foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in
+the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door. Debt was the
+man's proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of
+his church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy. At
+an early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he
+had two daughters and one son. One of the daughters died unmarried; the
+other imitated her father, and married "imprudently." The son, still
+more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded
+himself with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines,
+and was lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_. If he did
+not marry below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain
+great-uncle William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.
+
+The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post Office,
+followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married "not
+very creditably," and spent all the money he could lay his hands on. He
+died without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak
+intellect and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief
+career as one of Mrs. Buckner's satellites will fall to be considered
+later on. So soon, then, as the _Minotaur_ had struck upon the Dogger
+Bank, Stowting and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders
+of the third brother, Charles.
+
+Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by
+these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;
+but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness,
+both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a
+virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his
+relatives. Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt
+both salt-water and powder. The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as
+I can make out, to the land service. Stephen's son had been a soldier;
+William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy
+Braddock's in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold
+an estate on the James River, called after the parental seat; of which I
+should like well to hear if it still bears the name. It was probably by
+the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by
+his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction
+of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the _Prothee_, 64, that
+the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days of Rodney's war, when
+the _Prothee_, 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 _Prothee_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for
+all the world as it would have been done by his grandson.
+
+On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
+scurvy, received his mother's orders to retire; and he was not the man
+to refuse a request, far less to disobey a command. Thereupon he turned
+farmer, a trade he was to practise on a large scale; and we find him
+married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a
+London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,
+galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel. It does not
+appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or
+other it must have been; and the sailor-farmer settled at Stowting, with
+his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.
+Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were
+in his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas)
+he appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.
+He hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and
+Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. "Lord Rokeby, his
+neighbour, called him kinsman," writes my artless chronicler, "and
+altogether life was very cheery." At Stowting his three sons, John,
+Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all
+born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is through the
+report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at
+these confused passages of family history.
+
+In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the work of a
+fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.
+John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the
+Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and
+secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and
+being very rich--she died worth about L60,000, mostly in land--she was
+in perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this fortune hung before
+successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it
+dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.
+The grandniece, Stephen's daughter, the one who had not "married
+imprudently," appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad
+by the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792. Next she
+adopted William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with
+her--it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up with him in
+Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a
+place in the King's Body Guard, where he attracted the notice of George
+III. by his proficiency in German. In 1797, being on guard at St.
+James's Palace, William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne
+was once more left heirless. Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the
+Admiral, who had a kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by
+the good looks and the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner
+turned her eyes upon Charles Jenkin. He was not only to be the heir,
+however; he was to be the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of
+family farming. Mrs. Jenkin, the mother, contributed 164 acres of land;
+Mrs. Buckner, 570, some at Northiam, some farther off; Charles let
+one-half of Stowting to a tenant, and threw the other and various
+scattered parcels into the common enterprise; so that the whole farm
+amounted to near upon a thousand acres, and was scattered over thirty
+miles of country. The ex-seaman of thirty-nine, on whose wisdom and
+ubiquity the scheme depended, was to live in the meanwhile without care
+or fear. He was to check himself in nothing; his two extravagances,
+valuable horses and worthless brothers, were to be indulged in comfort;
+and whether the year quite paid itself or not, whether successive years
+left accumulated savings or only a growing deficit, the fortune of the
+golden aunt should in the end repair all.
+
+On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church
+House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three, among the
+number. Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that
+followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach
+and six, two post-horses and their own four; of the house full of
+visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants' hall
+laid for thirty or forty for a month together: of the daily press of
+neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and
+Dynes, were also kinsfolk: and the parties "under the great spreading
+chestnuts of the old fore court," where the young people danced and made
+merry to the music of the village band. Or perhaps, in the depth of
+winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would
+ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the
+pony's saddle-girths, and be received by the tenants like princes.
+
+This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of
+the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of the lads. John
+the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, "loud and notorious with his whip
+and spurs," settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the
+shoes of his father and his aunt. Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is
+briefly dismissed as "a handsome beau"; but he had the merit or the good
+fortune to become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he
+was not empty-handed for the war of life. Charles, at the day-school of
+Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod that his floggings became
+matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner. Hereupon
+that tall, rough-voiced formidable uncle entered with the lad into a
+covenant; every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral
+a penny; every day that he escaped, the process was to be reversed. "I
+recollect," writes Charles, "going crying to my mother to be taken to
+the Admiral to pay my debt." It would seem by these terms the
+speculation was a losing one; yet it is probable it paid indirectly by
+bringing the boy under remark. The Admiral was no enemy to dunces; he
+loved courage, and Charles, while yet little more than a baby, would
+ride the great horse into the pond. Presently it was decided that here
+was the stuff of a fine sailor; and at an early period the name of
+Charles Jenkin was entered on a ship's books.
+
+From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye,
+where the master took "infinite delight" in strapping him. "It keeps me
+warm and makes you grow," he used to say. And the stripes were not
+altogether wasted, for the dunce, though still very "raw," made progress
+with his studies. It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea,
+always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the
+glory was not altogether future, it wore a present form when he came
+driving to Rye behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral.
+"I was not a little proud, you may believe," says he.
+
+In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father
+to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace. The Bishop had heard from his
+brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an
+order from Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the Royal Naval
+College at Portsmouth. Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the
+head and said, "Charles will restore the old family"; by which I gather
+with some surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam
+and golden hope of my aunt's fortune, the family was supposed to stand
+in need of restoration. But the past is apt to look brighter than
+nature, above all to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages
+of Stephen and Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.
+
+What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in
+which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety
+and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at
+Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him and visited at Lord Melville's
+and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have "bumptious
+notions," and his head was "somewhat turned with fine people"; as to
+some extent it remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.
+
+In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain
+Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The Captain had earned this
+name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the
+pages of Marryat. "Put the prisoner's head in a bag and give him another
+dozen!" survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often
+punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship of this
+disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from
+Sheerness in December 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his
+pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which
+were ordered into the care of the gunner. "The old clerks and mates," he
+writes, "used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,
+and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish
+smuggler. This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little
+offensive."
+
+The _Conqueror_ carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at
+the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July 1817
+she relieved the flag-ship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm. Thus it befell that
+Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played
+a small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena.
+Life on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome. The anchor was never
+lifted, sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on
+shore except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial captive were
+signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the
+accessible portions of the coast. This prolonged stagnation and petty
+watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that "unchristian" climate,
+told cruelly on the health of the ship's company. In eighteen months,
+according to O'Meara, the _Conqueror_ had lost one hundred and ten men
+and invalided home one hundred and seven, "being more than a third of
+her complement." It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as
+once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more
+fortunate than some of his comrades. He drew in water-colour; not so
+badly as his father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the
+_Conqueror_ that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured
+him some alleviations. Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the
+Briars; and here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches
+of the historic house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a
+strange notion of the arts in our old English navy. Yet it was again as
+an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a
+second outing in a ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six weeks to
+windward of the island undertaken by the _Conqueror_ herself in quest of
+health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and
+at the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having "lost his
+health entirely."
+
+As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career
+came to an end. For forty-two years he continued to serve his country
+obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and
+honourable services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction.
+He was first two years in the _Larne_, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and
+keeping a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago.
+Captain Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner
+of the Ionian Islands--King Tom, as he was called--who frequently took
+passage in the _Larne_. King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean,
+and was a terror to the officers of the watch. He would come on deck at
+night; and with his broad Scots accent, "Well, sir," he would say, "what
+depth of water have ye? Well, now, sound; and ye'll just find so or so
+many fathoms," as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was
+generally right. On one occasion, as the ship was going into Corfu, Sir
+Thomas came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows.
+"Bangham"--Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord
+Bangham--"where the devil is that other chap? I left four fellows
+hanging there; now I can only see three. Mind there is another there
+to-morrow." And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next
+day. "Captain Hamilton, of the _Cambrian_, kept the Greeks in order
+afloat," writes my author, "and King Tom ashore."
+
+From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities was in
+the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a
+subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, "then very
+notorious," in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying
+dollars and provisions for the Government. While yet a midshipman, he
+accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar. In the
+brigantine _Griffon_, which he commanded in his last years in the West
+Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice
+earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to
+extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money
+due to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in San
+Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous imprisonment
+and the recovery of a "chest of money" of which they had been robbed.
+Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of public censure. This was
+in 1837, when he commanded the _Romney_, lying in the inner harbour of
+Havannah. The _Romney_ was in no proper sense a man-of-war; she was a
+slave-hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where
+negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained
+provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case, and
+either set them free or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship,
+already an eyesore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.
+The position was invidious: on one side were the tradition of the
+British flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the other,
+the certainty that if the slave were kept, the _Romney_ would be ordered
+at once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission
+compromised. Without consultation with any other officer, Captain Jenkin
+(then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and took the
+Captain-General's receipt. Lord Palmerston approved his course; but the
+zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never to be named without
+respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-nine years later the matter
+was again canvassed in Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain
+Jenkin defended by Admiral Erskine in a letter to the _Times_ (March 13,
+1876).
+
+In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot's
+flag-captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty pennants;
+and about the same time closed his career by an act of personal bravery.
+He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose
+cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches;
+his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and
+Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were
+no longer answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and
+slung up several insensible men with his own hand. For this act he
+received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of
+his gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted Commander, superseded,
+and could never again obtain employment.
+
+In 1828 or 1829 Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
+midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell-Jackson, who introduced him to his
+family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos
+Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally
+Scottish; and on the mother's side, counted kinship with some of the
+Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the Campbells of
+Auchenbreck. Her father, Colin, a merchant in Greenock, is said to have
+been the heir to both the estate and the baronetcy; he claimed neither,
+which casts a doubt upon the fact; but he had pride enough himself, and
+taught enough pride to his family, for any station or descent in
+Christendom. He had four daughters. One married an Edinburgh writer, as
+I have it on a first account--a minister, according to another--a man at
+least of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of
+Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded. Another married
+an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the tale) she had
+seen acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps be regarded rather
+as a measure of the family annoyance than a mirror of the facts. The
+marriage was not in itself unhappy; Adcock was a gentleman by birth and
+made a good husband; the family reasonably prospered, and one of the
+daughters married no less a man than Clarkson Stanfield. But by the
+father, and the two remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions
+and a truly Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented. For
+long the sisters lived estranged; then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock
+were reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the
+name of Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her sister's
+lips, until the morning when she announced: "Mary Adcock is dead; I saw
+her in her shroud last night." Second-sight was hereditary in the house;
+and sure enough, as I have it reported, on that very night Mrs. Adcock
+had passed away. Thus, of the four daughters, two had, according to the
+idiotic notions of their friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the
+others supported the honour of the family with a better grace, and
+married West Indian magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never
+heard and would not care to hear: so strange a thing is this hereditary
+pride. Of Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's
+grandfather, I know naught. His wife, as I have said, was a woman of
+fierce passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them
+with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons was a
+mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane violence of
+temper. She had three sons and one daughter. Two of the sons went
+utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty. The third went to
+India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly from the knowledge of
+his relatives that he was thought to be long dead. Years later, when his
+sister was living in Genoa, a red-bearded man of great strength and
+stature, tanned by years in India, and his hands covered with barbaric
+gems, entered the room unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted
+her from her seat, and kissed her. It was her brother, suddenly returned
+out of a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of
+general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and, next
+his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he had mixed
+blood.
+
+The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, became
+the wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the subject of
+this notice, Fleeming Jenkin. She was a woman of parts and courage. Not
+beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of seeming so; played the
+part of a belle in society, while far lovelier women were left
+unattended; and up to old age, had much of both the exigency and the
+charm that mark that character. She drew naturally, for she had no
+training, with unusual skill; and it was from her, and not from the two
+naval artists, that Fleeming inherited his eye and hand. She played on
+the harp and sang with something beyond the talent of an amateur. At the
+age of seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of
+youthful enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without
+introduction, found her way into the presence of the _prima donna_ and
+begged for lessons. Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she had done,
+and though she refused to be her mistress, placed her in the hands of a
+friend. Nor was this all; for when Pasta returned to Paris, she sent for
+the girl (once at least) to test her progress. But Mrs. Jenkin's talents
+were not so remarkable as her fortitude and strength of will; and it was
+in an art for which she had no natural taste (the art of literature)
+that she appeared before the public. Her novels, though they attained
+and merited a certain popularity both in France and England, are a
+measure only of her courage. They were a task, not a beloved task; they
+were written for money in days of poverty, and they served their end. In
+the least thing as well as in the greatest, in every province of life as
+well as in her novels, she displayed the same capacity of taking
+infinite pains, which descended to her son. When she was about forty (as
+near as her age was known) she lost her voice; set herself at once to
+learn the piano, working eight hours a day; and attained to such
+proficiency that her collaboration in chamber music was courted by
+professionals. And more than twenty years later the old lady might have
+been seen dauntlessly beginning the study of Hebrew. This is the more
+ethereal part of courage; nor was she wanting in the more material.
+Once when a neighbouring groom, a married man, had seduced her maid,
+Mrs. Jenkin mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance, and
+horsewhipped the man with her own hand.
+
+How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the
+young midshipman is not very easy to conceive. Charles Jenkin was one of
+the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, devotion, simple natural piety,
+boyish cheerfulness, tender and manly sentiment in the old sailor
+fashion, were in him inherent and inextinguishable either by age,
+suffering, or injustice. He looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman;
+he must have been everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for
+his face and his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you
+would have said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that,
+to this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But though he
+was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to the end no
+genius. Upon all points that a man must understand to be a gentleman, to
+be upright, gallant, affectionate, and dead to self, Captain Jenkin was
+more knowing than one among a thousand; outside of that, his mind was
+very largely blank. He had indeed a simplicity that came near to
+vacancy; and in the first forty years of his married life this want grew
+more accentuated. In both families imprudent marriages had been the
+rule; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell had ever entered into a more
+unequal union. It was the Captain's good looks, we may suppose, that
+gained for him this elevation; and in some ways and for many years of
+his life, he had to pay the penalty. His wife, impatient of his
+incapacity, and surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain
+contempt. She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his;
+after his retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor Captain, who
+could never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner mumchance;
+and even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did not recognise
+for long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay buried in the heart
+of his father. Yet it would be an error to regard this marriage as
+unfortunate. It not only lasted long enough to justify itself in a
+beautiful and touching epilogue, but it gave to the world the scientific
+work and what (while time was) were of far greater value, the delightful
+qualities of Fleeming Jenkin. The Kentish-Welsh family, facile,
+extravagant, generous to a fault, and far from brilliant, had given in
+the father an extreme example of its humble virtues. On the other side,
+the wild, cruel, proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scots
+Campbell-Jacksons had put forth, in the person of the mother, all its
+force and courage.
+
+The marriage fell in evil days. In 1823 the bubble of the golden aunt's
+inheritance had burst. She died holding the hand of the nephew she had
+so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down and seemed to bless
+him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for when the will was opened
+there was not found so much as the mention of his name. He was deeply in
+debt; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell
+a piece of land to clear himself. "My dear boy," he said to Charles,
+"there will be nothing left for you. I am a ruined man." And here
+follows for me the strangest part of this story. From the death of the
+treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin senior had still some nine years to
+live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and perhaps his
+affairs were past restoration. But his family at least had all this
+while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew what they had to
+look for at their father's death; and yet when that happened, in
+September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting. Poor John,
+the days of his whips and spurs and Yeomanry dinners were quite over;
+and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down,
+for the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a
+peasant. The mill farm at Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and
+here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two
+ends meet with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the
+road and not at all abashed at his employment. In dress, voice, and
+manner, he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least
+care for appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment
+with the present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic cheerfulness,
+announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was yet well pleased
+to go. One would think there was little active virtue to be inherited
+from such a race; and yet in this same voluntary peasant, the special
+gift of Fleeming Jenkin was already half developed. The old man to the
+end was perpetually inventing; his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated
+correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery receipts) of
+pumps, road-engines, steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam
+threshing-machines; and I have it on Fleeming's word that what he did
+was full of ingenuity--only, as if by some cross destiny, useless. These
+disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but
+rejoiced with a particular relish over his nephew's success in the same
+field. "I glory in the professor," he wrote to his brother; and to
+Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, "I was much pleased
+with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with Conisure's"
+(connoisseur's, _quasi_ amateur's) "engineering? Oh, what
+presumption!--either of you or myself!" A quaint, pathetic figure,
+this of uncle John, with his dung-cart and his inventions; and the
+romantic fancy of his Mexican house; and his craze about the Lost
+Tribes, which seemed to the worthy man the key of all perplexities; and
+his quiet conscience, looking back on a life not altogether vain, for he
+was a good son to his father while his father lived, and when evil days
+approached, he had proved himself a cheerful Stoic.
+
+It followed from John's inertia that the duty of winding up the estate
+fell into the hands of Charles. He managed it with no more skill than
+might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare livelihood for John
+and nothing for the rest. Eight months later he married Miss Jackson;
+and with her money bought in some two-thirds of Stowting. In the
+beginning of the little family history which I have been following to so
+great an extent, the Captain mentions, with a delightful pride: "A Court
+Baron and Court Leet are regularly held by the Lady of the Manor, Mrs.
+Henrietta Camilla Jenkin"; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his
+wife was the most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was
+heavily encumbered, and paid them nothing till some years before their
+death. In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild sons,
+an indulgent mother, and the impending emancipation of the slaves, was
+moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of two doomed and
+declining houses, the subject of this memoir was born, heir to an estate
+and to no money, yet with inherited qualities that were to make him
+known and loved.
+
+
+
+
+  CHAPTER II
+
+  1833-1851
+
+   Birth and childhood--Edinburgh--Frankfort-on-the-Main--Paris--The
+   Revolution of 1848--The Insurrection--Flight to Italy--Sympathy with
+   Italy--The insurrection in Genoa--A Student in Genoa--The lad and his
+   mother.
+
+
+Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (Fleeming, pronounced _Flemming_, to his
+friends and family) was born in a Government building on the coast of
+Kent, near Dungeness, where his father was serving at the time in the
+Coastguard, on March 25, 1833, and named after Admiral Fleeming, one of
+his father's protectors in the navy.
+
+His childhood was vagrant like his life. Once he was left in the care of
+his grandmother Jackson, while Mrs. Jenkin sailed in her husband's ship
+and stayed a year at the Havannah. The tragic woman was besides from
+time to time a member of the family; she was in distress of mind and
+reduced in fortune by the misconduct of her sons; her destitution and
+solitude made it a recurring duty to receive her, her violence
+continually enforced fresh separations. In her passion of a disappointed
+mother, she was a fit object of pity; but her grandson, who heard her
+load his own mother with cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her
+an indignant and impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later
+life. It is strange from this point of view to see his childish letters
+to Mrs. Jackson; and to think that a man, distinguished above all by
+stubborn truthfulness, should have been brought up to such
+dissimulation. But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did no harm
+to Jenkin; and whether he got harm or benefit from a so early
+acquaintance with violent and hateful scenes, is more than I can guess.
+The experience, at least, was formative; and in judging his character it
+should not be forgotten. But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in
+their gates; the Captain's sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, lived with them
+until her death; she had all the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though
+she was unhappily deformed in body and of frail health; and she even
+excelled her gentle and ineffectual family in all amiable qualities. So
+that each of the two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by
+his very cradle; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and
+the lifelong war in his members had begun thus early by a victory for
+what was best.
+
+We can trace the family from one country place to another in the south
+of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by riding home
+the pony from the moors. Before he was nine he could write such a
+passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance: "I pulled a
+middling-sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it. No
+witches would run after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my
+nuts blazed away together very comfortably to the end of their lives,
+and when mamma put hers in, which were meant for herself and papa, they
+blazed away in the like manner." Before he was ten he could write, with
+a really irritating precocity, that he had been "making some pictures
+from a book called 'Les Francais peints par eux-memes.' ... It is full
+of pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The
+pictures are a little caricatured, but not much." Doubtless this was
+only an echo from his mother, but it shows the atmosphere in which he
+breathed. It must have been a good change for this art critic to be the
+playmate of Mary Macdonald, their gardener's daughter at Barjarg, and to
+sup with her family on potatoes and milk; and Fleeming himself attached
+some value to this early and friendly experience of another class.
+
+His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh. Thence he went to
+the Edinburgh Academy, where Clerk Maxwell was his senior and Tait his
+classmate; bore away many prizes; and was once unjustly flogged by
+Rector Williams. He used to insist that all his bad school-fellows had
+died early, a belief amusingly characteristic of the man's consistent
+optimism. In 1846 the mother and son proceeded to Frankfort-on-the-Main,
+where they were soon joined by the father, now reduced to inaction and
+to play something like third fiddle in his narrow household. The
+emancipation of the slaves had deprived them of their last resource
+beyond the half-pay of a captain; and life abroad was not only desirable
+for the sake of Fleeming's education, it was almost enforced by reasons
+of economy. But it was, no doubt, somewhat hard upon the Captain.
+Certainly that perennial boy found a companion in his son; they were
+both active and eager, both willing to be amused, both young, if not in
+years, then in character. They went out together on excursions and
+sketched old castles, sitting side by side; they had an angry rivalry in
+walking, doubtless equally sincere upon both sides; and indeed we may
+say that Fleeming was exceptionally favoured, and that no boy had ever a
+companion more innocent, engaging, gay, and airy. But although in this
+case it would be easy to exaggerate its import, yet, in the Jenkin
+family also, the tragedy of the generations was proceeding, and the
+child was growing out of his father's knowledge. His artistic aptitude
+was of a different order. Already he had his quick sight of many sides
+of life; he already overflowed with distinctions and generalisations,
+contrasting the dramatic art and national character of England, Germany,
+Italy, and France. If he were dull he would write stories and poems. "I
+have written," he says at thirteen, "a very long story in heroic
+measure, 300 lines, and another Scotch story and innumerable bits of
+poetry"; and at the same age he had not only a keen feeling for scenery,
+but could do something with his pen to call it up. I feel I do always
+less than justice to the delightful memory of Captain Jenkin; but with a
+lad of this character, cutting the teeth of his intelligence, he was
+sure to fall into the background.
+
+The family removed in 1847 to Paris, where Fleeming was put to school
+under one Deluc. There he learned French, and (if the Captain is right)
+first began to show a taste for mathematics. But a far more important
+teacher than Deluc was at hand; the year 1848, so momentous for Europe,
+was momentous also for Fleeming's character. The family politics were
+Liberal; Mrs. Jenkin, generous before all things, was sure to be upon the
+side of exiles; and in the house of a Paris friend of hers, Mrs.
+Turner--already known to fame as Shelley's Cornelia de Boinville--Fleeming
+saw and heard such men as Manin, Gioberti, and the Ruffinis. He was thus
+prepared to sympathise with revolution; and when the hour came, and he
+found himself in the midst of stirring and influential events, the lad's
+whole character was moved. He corresponded at that time with a young
+Edinburgh friend, one Frank Scott; and I am here going to draw somewhat
+largely on this boyish correspondence. It gives us at once a picture of
+the Revolution and a portrait of Jenkin at fifteen; not so different (his
+friends will think) from the Jenkin of the end--boyish, simple,
+opinionated, delighting in action, delighting before all things in any
+generous sentiment.
+
+
+    _"February 23, 1848._
+
+  "When at 7 o'clock to-day I went out, I met a large band going round
+  the streets, calling on the inhabitants to illuminate their houses,
+  and bearing torches. This was all very good fun, and everybody was
+  delighted; but as they stopped rather long and were rather turbulent
+  in the Place de la Madeleine, near where we live" [in the Rue
+  Caumartin] "a squadron of dragoons came up, formed, and charged at a
+  hand-gallop. This was a very pretty sight; the crowd was not too
+  thick, so they easily got away; and the dragoons only gave blows with
+  the back of the sword, which hurt but did not wound. I was as close to
+  them as I am now to the other side of the table; it was rather
+  impressive, however. At the second charge they rode on the pavement
+  and knocked the torches out of the fellows' hands; rather a shame,
+  too--wouldn't be stood in England...."
+
+  [At] "ten minutes to ten.... I went a long way along the Boulevards,
+  passing by the office of Foreign Affairs, where Guizot lives, and
+  where to-night there were about a thousand troops protecting him from
+  the fury of the populace. After this was passed, the number of the
+  people thickened, till about half a mile further on, I met a troop of
+  vagabonds, the wildest vagabonds in the world--Paris vagabonds, well
+  armed, having probably broken into gunsmiths' shops and taken the guns
+  and swords. They were about a hundred. These were followed by about a
+  thousand (I am rather diminishing than exaggerating numbers all
+  through), indifferently armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc. An
+  uncountable troop of gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers' wives (Paris
+  women dare anything), ladies'-maids, common women--in fact, a crowd of
+  all classes, though by far the greater number were of the
+  better-dressed class--followed. Indeed, it was a splendid sight: the
+  mob in front chanting the 'Marseillaise,' the national war-hymn, grave
+  and powerful, sweetened by the night air--though night in these
+  splendid streets was turned into day, every window was filled with
+  lamps, dim torches were tossing in the crowd, ... for Guizot has late
+  this night given in his resignation, and this was an improvised
+  illumination.
+
+  "I and my father had turned with the crowd, and were close behind the
+  second troop of vagabonds. Joy was on every face. I remarked to papa
+  that 'I would not have missed the scene for anything, I might never
+  see such a splendid one,' when _plong_ went one shot--every face went
+  pale--_r-r-r-r-r_ went the whole detachment, [and] the whole crowd of
+  gentlemen and ladies turned and cut. Such a scene!--ladies, gentlemen,
+  and vagabonds went sprawling in the mud, not shot but tripped up; and
+  those that went down could not rise, they were trampled over.... I ran
+  a short time straight on and did not fall, then turned down a side
+  street, ran fifty yards and felt tolerably safe; looked for papa, did
+  not see him; so walked on quickly, giving the news as I went." [It
+  appears, from another letter, the boy was the first to carry word of
+  the firing to the Rue St. Honore; 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 _detour_, I found a passage and ran home, and in our
+  street joined papa.
+
+  "... I'll tell you to-morrow the other facts gathered from newspapers
+  and papa.... To-night I have given you what I have seen with my own
+  eyes an hour ago, and began trembling with excitement and fear. If I
+  have been too long on this one subject, it is because it is yet before
+  my eyes.
+
+
+    "_Monday, 24._
+
+  "It was that fire raised the people. There was fighting all through
+  the night in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, on the Boulevards where
+  they had been shot at, and at the Porte St. Denis. At ten o'clock they
+  resigned the house of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (where the
+  disastrous volley was fired) to the people, who immediately took
+  possession of it. I went to school but [was] hardly there when the row
+  in that quarter commenced. Barricades began to be fixed. Every one was
+  very grave now; the _externes_ went away, but no one came to fetch me,
+  so I had to stay. No lessons could go on. A troop of armed men took
+  possession of the barricades, so it was supposed I should have to
+  sleep there. The revolters came and asked for arms, but Deluc
+  (head-master) is a National Guard, and he said he had only his own and
+  he wanted them; but he said he would not fire on them. Then they asked
+  for wine, which he gave them. They took good care not to get drunk,
+  knowing they would not be able to fight. They were very polite, and
+  behaved extremely well.
+
+  "About twelve o'clock a servant came for a boy who lived near me,
+  [and] Deluc thought it best to send me with him. We heard a good deal
+  of firing near, but did not come across any of the parties. As we
+  approached the railway, the barricades were no longer formed of
+  palings, planks, or stones; but they had got all the omnibuses as they
+  passed, sent the horses and passengers about their business, and
+  turned them over. A double row of overturned coaches made a capital
+  barricade, with a few paving-stones.
+
+  "When I got home I found to my astonishment that in our fighting
+  quarter it was much quieter. Mamma had just been out seeing the troops
+  in the Place de la Concorde, when suddenly the Municipal Guard, now
+  fairly exasperated, prevented the National Guard from proceeding, and
+  fired at them; the National Guard had come with their musquets not
+  loaded, but at length returned the fire. Mamma saw the National Guard
+  fire. The Municipal Guard were round the corner. She was delighted,
+  for she saw no person killed, though many of the Municipals were....
+
+  "I immediately went out with my papa (mamma had just come back with
+  him) and went to the Place de la Concorde. There was an enormous
+  quantity of troops in the Place. Suddenly the gates of the gardens of
+  the Tuileries opened: we rushed forward, out galloped an enormous
+  number of cuirassiers, in the middle of which were a couple of low
+  carriages, said first to contain the Count de Paris and the Duchess of
+  Orleans, but afterwards they said it was the King and Queen; and then
+  I heard he had abdicated. I returned and gave the news.
+
+  "Went out again up the Boulevards. The house of the Minister of
+  Foreign Affairs was filled with people and '_Hotel du Peuple_' written
+  on it; the Boulevards were barricaded with fine old trees that were
+  cut down and stretched all across the road. We went through a great
+  many little streets, all strongly barricaded, and sentinels of the
+  people at the principal of them. The streets are very unquiet, filled
+  with armed men and women, for the troops had followed the ex-King to
+  Neuilly and left Paris in the power of the people. We met the captain
+  of the Third Legion of the National Guard (who had principally
+  protected the people) badly wounded by a Municipal Guard, stretched on
+  a litter. He was in possession of his senses. He was surrounded by a
+  troop of men crying, 'Our brave captain--we have him yet--he's not
+  dead! _Vive la Reforme!_' This cry was responded to by all, and every
+  one saluted him as he passed. I do not know if he was mortally
+  wounded. That Third Legion has behaved splendidly.
+
+  "I then returned, and shortly afterwards went out again to the garden
+  of the Tuileries. They were given up to the people and the palace was
+  being sacked. The people were firing blank cartridge to testify their
+  joy, and they had a cannon on the top of the palace. It was a sight to
+  see a palace sacked, and armed vagabonds firing out of the windows,
+  and throwing shirts, papers, and dresses of all kinds out of the
+  windows. They are not rogues, these French; they are not stealing,
+  burning, or doing much harm. In the Tuileries they have dressed up
+  some of the statues, broken some, and stolen nothing but queer
+  dresses. I say, Frank, you must not hate the French; hate the Germans
+  if you like. The French laugh at us a little and call out _Goddam_ in
+  the streets; but to-day, in civil war, when they might have put a
+  bullet through our heads, I never was insulted once.
+
+  "At present we have a provisional Government, consisting of Odion
+  [_sic_] Barrot, Lamartine, Marast, and some others; among them a
+  common workman, but very intelligent. This is a triumph of
+  liberty--rather!
+
+  "Now, then, Frank, what do you think of it? I in a revolution and out
+  all day. Just think, what fun! So it was at first, till I was fired at
+  yesterday; but to-day I was not frightened, but it turned me sick at
+  heart, I don't know why. There has been no great bloodshed, [though] I
+  certainly have seen men's blood several times. But there's something
+  shocking to see a whole armed populace, though not furious, for not
+  one single shop has been broken open, except the gunsmiths' shops, and
+  most of the arms will probably be taken back again. For the French
+  have no cupidity in their nature; they don't like to steal--it is not
+  in their nature. I shall send this letter in a day or two, when I am
+  sure the post will go again. I know I have been a long time writing,
+  but I hope you will find the matter of this letter interesting, as
+  coming from a person resident on the spot; though probably you don't
+  take much interest in the French, but I can think, write, and speak on
+  no other subject.
+
+
+    "_Feb. 25._
+
+  "There is no more fighting, the people have conquered; but the
+  barricades are still kept up, and the people are in arms, more than
+  ever fearing some new act of treachery on the part of the ex-King. The
+  fight where I was was the principal cause of the Revolution. I was in
+  little danger from the shot, for there was an immense crowd in front
+  of me, though quite within gunshot. [By another letter, a hundred
+  yards from the troops.] I wished I had stopped there.
+
+  "The Paris streets are filled with the most extraordinary crowds of
+  men, women, and children, ladies and gentlemen. Every person joyful.
+  The bands of armed men are perfectly polite. Mamma and aunt to-day
+  walked through armed crowds alone, that were firing blank cartridges
+  in all directions. Every person made way with the greatest politeness,
+  and one common man with a blouse, coming by accident against her,
+  immediately stopped to beg her pardon in the politest manner. There
+  are few drunken men. The Tuileries is still being run over by the
+  people; they only broke two things, a bust of Louis Philippe and one
+  of Marshal Bugeaud, who fired on the people....
+
+  "I have been out all day again to-day, and precious tired I am. The
+  Republican party seems the strongest, and are going about with red
+  ribbons in their button-holes....
+
+  "The title of 'Mister' is abandoned: they say nothing but 'Citizen,'
+  and the people are shaking hands amazingly. They have got to the top
+  of the public monuments, and, mingling with bronze or stone statues,
+  five or six make a sort of _tableau vivant_, the top man holding up
+  the red flag of the Republic; and right well they do it, and very
+  picturesque they look. I think I shall put this letter in the post
+  to-morrow as we got a letter to-night.
+
+
+    (_On Envelope._)
+
+  "M. Lamartine has now by his eloquence conquered the whole armed crowd
+  of citizens threatening to kill him if he did not immediately proclaim
+  the Republic and red flag. He said he could not yield to the citizens
+  of Paris alone, that the whole country must be consulted, that he
+  chose the tricolour, for it had followed and accompanied the triumphs
+  of France all over the world, and that the red flag had only been
+  dipped in the blood of the citizens. For sixty hours he has been
+  quieting the people: he is at the head of everything. Don't be
+  prejudiced, Frank, by what you see in the papers. The French have
+  acted nobly, splendidly; there has been no brutality, plundering, or
+  stealing.... I did not like the French before; but in this respect
+  they are the finest people in the world. I am so glad to have been
+  here."
+
+And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty and
+order read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the reader
+knows, it was but the first act of the piece. The letters, vivid as they
+are, written as they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement,
+yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the profound effect
+produced. At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy's mind
+awoke. He dated his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day
+when he saw and heard Rachel recite the "Marseillaise" at the Francais,
+the tricolor in her arms. What is still more strange, he had been up to
+then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not
+distinguish "God save the Queen" from "Bonnie Dundee"; and now, to the
+chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and singing
+"Mourir pour la Patrie." But the letters, though they prepare the mind
+for no such revolution in the boy's tastes and feelings, are yet full of
+entertaining traits. Let the reader note Fleeming's eagerness to
+influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further
+history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and
+devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and
+omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive "person resident on
+the spot," who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture
+of the household--father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna--all day
+in the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed
+off alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the
+massacre.
+
+They had all the gift of enjoying life's texture as it comes: they were
+all born optimists. The name of liberty was honoured in that family, its
+spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign
+friends of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the
+Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, they beheld
+
+  "France standing on the top of golden hours
+   And human nature seeming born again."
+
+At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their element in
+such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in its course,
+moderate in its purpose. For them,
+
+  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
+   But to be young was very heaven."
+
+And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth) they
+should have so specially disliked the consequence.
+
+It came upon them by surprise. Liberal friends of the precise right
+shade of colour had assured them, in Mrs. Turner's drawing-room, that
+all was for the best; and they rose on February 28 without fear. About
+the middle of the day they heard the sound of musketry, and the next
+morning they were wakened by the cannonade. The French, who had behaved
+so "splendidly," pausing, at the voice of Lamartine, just where
+judicious Liberals could have desired--the French, who had "no cupidity
+in their nature," were now about to play a variation on the theme
+rebellion. The Jenkins took refuge in the house of Mrs. Turner, the
+house of the false prophets, "Anna going with Mrs. Turner, that she
+might be prevented speaking English, Fleeming, Miss H., and I" (it is
+the mother who writes) "walking together. As we reached the Rue de
+Clichy the report of the cannon sounded close to our ears and made our
+hearts sick, I assure you. The fighting was at the barrier Rochechouart,
+a few streets off. All Saturday and Sunday we were a prey to great
+alarm, there came so many reports that the insurgents were getting the
+upper hand. One could tell the state of affairs from the extreme quiet
+or the sudden hum in the street. When the news was bad, all the houses
+closed and the people disappeared; when better, the doors half opened
+and you heard the sound of men again. From the upper windows we could
+see each discharge from the Bastille--I mean the smoke rising--and also
+the flames and smoke from the Boulevard la Chapelle. We were four
+ladies, and only Fleeming by way of a man, and difficulty enough we had
+to keep him from joining the National Guards--his pride and spirit were
+both fired. You cannot picture to yourself the multitudes of soldiers,
+guards, and armed men of all sorts we watched--not close to the window,
+however, for such havoc had been made among them by the firing from the
+windows, that as the battalions marched by, they cried, '_Fermez vos
+fenetres!_' and it was very painful to watch their looks of anxiety and
+suspicion as they marched by."
+
+"The Revolution," writes Fleeming to Frank Scott, "was quite delightful:
+getting popped at, and run at by horses, and giving sous for the wounded
+into little boxes guarded by the raggedest, picturesquest,
+delightfullest sentinels; but the insurrection! ugh, I shudder to think
+at [_sic_] it." He found it "not a bit of fun sitting boxed up in the
+house four days almost.... I was the only _gentleman_ to four ladies,
+and didn't they keep me in order! I did not dare to show my face at a
+window, for fear of catching a stray ball or being forced to enter the
+National Guard; [for] they would have it I was a man full grown, French,
+and every way fit to fight. And my mamma was as bad as any of them; she
+that told me I was a coward last time if I stayed in the house a quarter
+of an hour! But I drew, examined the pistols, of which I found lots with
+caps, powder, and ball, while sometimes murderous intentions of killing
+a dozen insurgents and dying violently overpowered by numbers...." We may
+drop this sentence here: under the conduct of its boyish writer, it was
+to reach no legitimate end.
+
+Four days of such a discipline had cured the family of Paris; the same
+year Fleeming was to write, in answer apparently to a question of Frank
+Scott's, "I could find no national game in France but revolutions"; and
+the witticism was justified in their experience. On the first possible
+day they applied for passports, and were advised to take the road to
+Geneva. It appears it was scarce safe to leave Paris for England.
+Charles Reade, with keen dramatic gusto, had just smuggled himself out
+of that city in the bottom of a cab. English gold had been found on the
+insurgents, the name of England was in evil odour; and it was thus--for
+strategic reasons, so to speak--that Fleeming found himself on the way
+to that Italy where he was to complete his education, and for which he
+cherished to the end a special kindness.
+
+It was in Genoa they settled; partly for the sake of the Captain, who
+might there find naval comrades; partly because of the Ruffinis, who had
+been friends of Mrs. Jenkin in their time of exile, and were now
+considerable men at home; partly, in fine, with hopes that Fleeming
+might attend the University; in preparation for which he was put at once
+to school. It was the year of Novara; Mazzini was in Rome; the dry bones
+of Italy were moving; and for people of alert and liberal sympathies the
+time was inspiriting. What with exiles turned Ministers of State,
+Universities thrown open to Protestants, Fleeming himself the first
+Protestant student in Genoa, and thus, as his mother writes, "a living
+instance of the progress of liberal ideas"--it was little wonder if the
+enthusiastic young woman and the clever boy were heart and soul upon the
+side of Italy. It should not be forgotten that they were both on their
+first visit to that country; the mother still "child enough" to be
+delighted when she saw "real monks"; and both mother and son thrilling
+with the first sight of snowy Alps, the blue Mediterranean, and the
+crowded port and the palaces of Genoa. Nor was their zeal without
+knowledge. Ruffini, deputy for Genoa, and soon to be head of the
+University, was at their side; and by means of him the family appear to
+have had access to much Italian society. To the end, Fleeming professed
+his admiration of the Piedmontese, and his unalterable confidence in the
+future of Italy under their conduct; for Victor Emanuel, Cavour, the
+first La Marmora and Garibaldi, he had varying degrees of sympathy and
+praise: perhaps highest for the King, whose good sense and temper
+filled him with respect--perhaps least for Garibaldi, whom he loved but
+yet mistrusted.
+
+But this is to look forward; these were the days not of Victor Emanuel
+but of Charles Albert; and it was on Charles Albert that mother and son
+had now fixed their eyes as on the sword-bearer of Italy. On Fleeming's
+sixteenth birthday, they were, the mother writes, "in great anxiety for
+news from the army. You can have no idea what it is to live in a country
+where such a struggle is going on. The interest is one that absorbs all
+others. We eat, drink, and sleep to the noise of drums and musketry. You
+would enjoy and almost admire Fleeming's enthusiasm and earnestness--and
+courage, I may say--for we are among the small minority of English who
+side with the Italians. The other day, at dinner at the Consul's, boy as
+he is, and in spite of my admonitions, Fleeming defended the Italian
+cause, and so well that he 'tripped up the heels of his adversary'
+simply from being well-informed on the subject and honest. He is as true
+as steel, and for no one will he bend right or left.... Do not fancy him
+a Bobadil," she adds, "he is only a very true, candid boy. I am so glad
+he remains in all respects but information a great child."
+
+If this letter is correctly dated, the cause was already lost, and the
+King had already abdicated when these lines were written. No sooner did
+the news reach Genoa, than there began "tumultuous movements"; and the
+Jenkins received hints it would be wise to leave the city. But they had
+friends and interests; even the Captain had English officers to keep him
+company, for Lord Hardwicke's ship, the _Vengeance_, lay in port; and
+supposing the danger to be real, I cannot but suspect the whole family
+of a divided purpose, prudence being possibly weaker than curiosity.
+Stay, at least, they did, and thus rounded their experience of the
+revolutionary year. On Sunday, April 1, Fleeming and the Captain went
+for a ramble beyond the walls, leaving Aunt Anna and Mrs. Jenkin to
+walk on the bastions with some friends. On the way back, this party
+turned aside to rest in the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie. "We had
+remarked," writes Mrs. Jenkin, "the entire absence of sentinels on the
+ramparts, and how the cannons were left in solitary state; and I had
+just remarked 'How quiet everything is!' when suddenly we heard the
+drums begin to beat, and distant shouts. _Accustomed as we are_ to
+revolutions, we never thought of being frightened." For all that, they
+resumed their return home. On the way they saw men running and
+vociferating, but nothing to indicate a general disturbance, until, near
+the Duke's palace, they came upon and passed a shouting mob dragging
+along with it three cannon. It had scarcely passed before they heard "a
+rushing sound"; one of the gentlemen thrust back the party of ladies
+under a shed, and the mob passed again. A fine-looking young man was in
+their hands; and Mrs. Jenkin saw him with his mouth open as if he sought
+to speak, saw him tossed from one to another like a ball, and then saw
+him no more. "He was dead a few instants after, but the crowd hid that
+terror from us. My knees shook under me and my sight left me." With this
+street tragedy the curtain rose upon the second revolution.
+
+The attack on Spirito Santo and the capitulation and departure of the
+troops speedily followed. Genoa was in the hands of the Republicans, and
+now came a time when the English residents were in a position to pay
+some return for hospitality received. Nor were they backward. Our Consul
+(the same who had the benefit of correction from Fleeming) carried the
+Intendente on board the _Vengeance_, escorting him through the streets,
+getting along with him on board a shore boat, and when the insurgents
+levelled their muskets, standing up and naming himself "_Console
+Inglese_." A friend of the Jenkins, Captain Glynne, had a more painful,
+if a less dramatic part. One Colonel Nosozzo had been killed (I read)
+while trying to prevent his own artillery from firing on the mob; but
+in that hell's caldron of a distracted city, there were no distinctions
+made, and the Colonel's widow was hunted for her life. In her grief and
+peril, the Glynnes received and hid her; Captain Glynne sought and found
+her husband's body among the slain, saved it for two days, brought the
+widow a lock of the dead man's hair; but at last, the mob still strictly
+searching, seems to have abandoned the body, and conveyed his guest on
+board the _Vengeance_. The Jenkins also had their refugees, the family
+of an _employe_ 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
+_protege_, perhaps also to the first Protestant student. It was no joke
+for Signor Flaminio at first; certificates had to be got from Paris and
+from Rector Williams; the classics must be furbished up at home that he
+might follow Latin lectures; examinations bristled in the path, the
+entrance examination with Latin and English essay, and oral trials (much
+softened for the foreigner) in Horace, Tacitus, and Cicero, and the
+first University examination only three months later, in Italian
+eloquence, no less, and other wider subjects. On one point the first
+Protestant student was moved to thank his stars: that there was no Greek
+required for the degree. Little did he think, as he set down his
+gratitude, how much, in later life and among cribs and dictionaries, he
+was to lament this circumstance; nor how much of that later life he was
+to spend acquiring, with infinite toil, a shadow of what he might then
+have got with ease, and fully. But if his Genoese education was in this
+particular imperfect, he was fortunate in the branches that more
+immediately touched on his career. The physical laboratory was the best
+mounted in Italy. Bancalari, the professor of natural philosophy, was
+famous in his day; by what seems even an odd coincidence, he went deeply
+into electro-magnetism; and it was principally in that subject that
+Signor Flaminio, questioned in Latin and answering in Italian, passed
+his Master of Arts degree with first-class honours. That he had secured
+the notice of his teachers one circumstance sufficiently proves. A
+philosophical society was started under the presidency of Mamiani, "one
+of the examiners and one of the leaders of the Moderate party"; and out
+of five promising students brought forward by the professors to attend
+the sittings and present essays, Signor Flaminio was one. I cannot find
+that he ever read an essay; and indeed I think his hands were otherwise
+too full. He found his fellow-students "not such a bad set of chaps,"
+and preferred the Piedmontese before the Genoese; but I suspect he mixed
+not very freely with either. Not only were his days filled with
+University work, but his spare hours were fully dedicated to the arts
+under the eye of a beloved task-mistress. He worked hard and well in the
+art school, where he obtained a silver medal "for a couple of legs the
+size of life drawn from one of Raphael's cartoons." His holidays were
+spent in sketching; his evenings, when they were free, at the theatre.
+Here at the opera he discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art
+of music; and it was, he wrote, "as if he had found out a heaven on
+earth." "I am so anxious that whatever he professes to know, he should
+really perfectly possess," his mother wrote, "that I spare no pains";
+neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he
+begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with
+characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence
+"heart-rending groans" and saw "anguished claspings of hands" as he lost
+his way among their arid intricacies.
+
+In this picture of the lad at the piano there is something, for the
+period, girlish. He was indeed his mother's boy; and it was fortunate
+his mother was not altogether feminine. She gave her son a womanly
+delicacy in morals, to a man's taste--to his own taste in later
+life--too finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than healthful. She
+encouraged him besides in drawing-room interests. But in other points
+her influence was manlike. Filled with the spirit of thoroughness, she
+taught him to make of the least of these accomplishments a virile task;
+and the teaching lasted him through life. Immersed as she was in the
+day's movements, and buzzed about by leading Liberals, she handed on to
+him her creed in politics: an enduring kindness for Italy, and a
+loyalty, like that of many clever women, to the Liberal party with but
+small regard to men or measures. This attitude of mind used often to
+disappoint me in a man so fond of logic; but I see now how it was
+learned from the bright eyes of his mother, and to the sound of the
+cannonades of 1848. To some of her defects, besides, she made him heir.
+Kind as was the bond that united her to her son, kind, and even pretty,
+she was scarce a woman to adorn a home; loving as she did to shine;
+careless as she was of domestic, studious of public graces. She probably
+rejoiced to see the boy grow up in somewhat of the image of herself,
+generous, excessive, enthusiastic, external; catching at ideas,
+brandishing them when caught; fiery for the right, but always fiery;
+ready at fifteen to correct a consul, ready at fifty to explain to any
+artist his own art.
+
+The defects and advantages of such a training were obvious in Fleeming
+throughout life. His thoroughness was not that of the patient scholar,
+but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate study; he had learned
+too much from dogma, given indeed by cherished lips; and precocious as
+he was in the use of the tools of the mind, he was truly backward in
+knowledge of life and of himself. Such as it was at least, his home and
+school training was now complete; and you are to conceive the lad as
+being formed in a household of meagre revenue, among foreign
+surroundings, and under the influence of an imperious drawing-room
+queen; from whom he learned a great refinement of morals, a strong sense
+of duty, much forwardness of bearing, all manner of studious and
+artistic interests, and many ready-made opinions which he embraced with
+a son's and a disciple's loyalty.
+
+
+
+
+  CHAPTER III
+
+  1851-1858
+
+   Return to England--Fleeming at Fairbairn's--Experience in a
+   strike--Dr. Bell and Greek architecture--The Gaskells--Fleeming at
+   Greenwich--The Austins--Fleeming and the Austins--His
+   engagement--Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson.
+
+
+In 1851, the year of Aunt Anna's death, the family left Genoa and came
+to Manchester, where Fleeming was entered in Fairbairn's works as an
+apprentice. From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue Mediterranean,
+the humming lanes and the bright theatres of Genoa, he fell--and he was
+sharply conscious of the fall--to the dim skies and the foul ways of
+Manchester. England he found on his return "a horrid place," and there
+is no doubt the family found it a dear one. The story of the Jenkin
+finances is not easy to follow. The family, I am told, did not practise
+frugality, only lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who
+was always complaining of those "dreadful bills," was "always a good
+deal dressed." But at this time of the return to England, things must
+have gone further. A holiday tour of a fortnight Fleeming feared would
+be beyond what he could afford, and he only projected it "to have a
+castle in the air." And there were actual pinches. Fresh from a warmer
+sun, he was obliged to go without a greatcoat, and learned on railway
+journeys to supply the place of one with wrappings of old newspaper.
+
+From half-past eight till six, he must "file and chip vigorously in a
+moleskin suit and infernally dirty." The work was not new to him, for he
+had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work
+was without interest. Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know
+and do also. "I never learned anything," he wrote, "not even standing on
+my head, but I found a use for it." In the spare hours of his first
+telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he
+meant "to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the ship, and
+how to handle her on any occasion"; and once when he was shown a young
+lady's holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, "It showed me my
+eyes had been idle." Nor was his the case of the mere literary
+smatterer, content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do
+and to do well was even a dearer ambition than to know. Anything done
+well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him. I
+remember him with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly
+fitted that, when one was driven home, the others started from their
+places; the whole spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box;
+that plain piece of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of
+perfection as the happiest drawing or the finest bronze, and he who
+could not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the
+others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo's engineering and anatomical
+drawings a perpetual feast; and of the former he spoke even with
+emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to
+separate the fine arts from the arts of handicraft; any definition or
+theory that failed to bring these two together, according to him, had
+missed the point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing
+things well done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last to deny
+that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all. And on the
+other hand, a nail ill driven, a joint ill fitted, a tracing clumsily
+done, anything to which a man had set his hand and not set it aptly,
+moved him to shame and anger. With such a character, he would feel but
+little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There would be something daily to be
+done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be
+attained; he would chip and file, as he had practised scales, impatient
+of his own imperfection, but resolute to learn.
+
+And there was another spring of delight. For he was now moving daily
+among those strange creations of man's brain, to some so abhorrent, to
+him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron, water, and fire are
+made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more powerful than an
+elephant's, and now with a touch more precise and dainty than a
+pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I could never share with
+him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness. Once when I had
+proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect, he looked at
+me askance: "And the best of the joke," said he, "is that he thinks
+himself quite a poet." For to him the struggle of the engineer against
+brute forces and with inert allies was nobly poetic. Habit never dulled
+in him the sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his
+profession. Habit only sharpened his inventor's gusto in contrivance, in
+triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
+taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave
+and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant the great results alone are
+admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in particular, rather the
+infinite device and sleight of mind that made them possible.
+
+A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn's, a
+pupil would never be popular unless he drank with the workmen and
+imitated them in speech and manner. Fleeming, who would do none of these
+things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the
+subject of remark in Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till
+to-day. He thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be
+brought in a close relation with the working classes; and for the
+skilled artisan he had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues,
+and his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well to
+regard them, like a platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, on the other
+hand, broad distinctions; and it was his profound sense of the
+difference between one working man and another that led him to devote so
+much time, in later days, to the furtherance of technical education. In
+1852 he had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in the
+excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both
+would seem to have behaved. Beginning with a fair show of justice on
+either side, the masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy,
+and the men disgraced their order by acts of outrage. "On Wednesday
+last," writes Fleeming, "about three thousand banded round Fairbairn's
+door at 6 o'clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the
+lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders came that no one was to
+leave the works; but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called)
+were precious hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my
+companions and myself went out with the very first, and had the full
+benefit of every possible groan and bad language." But the police
+cleared a lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape
+unhurt, and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so
+that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill of
+expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob. "I never
+before felt myself so decidedly somebody, instead of nobody," he wrote.
+
+Outside as inside the works, he was "pretty merry and well-to-do,"
+zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-kindness
+to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell,
+"working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek
+architectural proportions": a business after Fleeming's heart, for he
+was never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and
+science. This was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love
+and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the
+greatest, from the _Agamemnon_ (perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to
+the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to express in his
+familiar phrase: "The Greeks were the boys." Dr. Bell--the son of
+George Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and, though he made less use
+of it than some, a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race--had
+hit upon the singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave
+the proportions of the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's
+direction, applied the same method to the other orders, and again found
+the proportions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were prepared; but
+the discovery was never given to the world, perhaps because of the
+dissensions that arose between the authors. For Dr. Bell believed that
+"these intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of,
+the antagonistic forces at work"; but his pupil and helper, with
+characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted
+the discovery as "a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as
+might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical, and in no way
+connected with any laws of either force or beauty." "Many a hard and
+pleasant fight we had over it," wrote Jenkin, in later years; "and
+impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the
+arguments of the master." I do not know about the antagonistic forces in
+the Doric order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of
+these affairs with Dr. Bell was still, like the corrector of Italian
+consuls, "a great child in everything but information." At the house of
+Colonel Cleather, he might be seen with a family of children; and with
+these there was no word of the Greek orders; with these Fleeming was
+only an uproarious boy and an entertaining draughtsman; so that his
+coming was the signal for the young people to troop into the playroom,
+where sometimes the roof rang with romping, and sometimes they gathered
+quietly about him as he amused them with his pencil.
+
+In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my
+readers--that of the Gaskells,--Fleeming was a frequent visitor. To Mrs.
+Gaskell he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his
+later friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember. With
+the girls he had "constant fierce wrangles," forcing them to reason out
+their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss
+Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of
+his character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish
+devotion to his parents. Of one of these wrangles I have found a record
+most characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his
+doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right
+"to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar, or to steal a knife to
+prevent a murder"; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what
+is current, had rejected the heresy with indignation. From such
+passages-at-arms many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no
+sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration of the
+spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself
+"what truth was sticking in their heads"; for even the falsest form of
+words (in Fleeming's life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as
+he could "not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire
+what is pretty in the ugly thing." And before he sat down to write his
+letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. "I fancy the true
+idea," he wrote, "is that you must never do yourself or any one else a
+moral injury--make any man a thief or a liar--for any end"; quite a
+different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never
+stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not always out of
+key with his audience. One whom he met in the same house announced that
+she would never again be happy. "What does that signify?" cried
+Fleeming. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good." And the words
+(as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of motto during life.
+
+From Fairbairn's and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in
+Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn's at Greenwich, where he was
+engaged as draughtsman. There, in 1856, we find him in "a terribly busy
+state, finishing up engines for innumerable gunboats and steam frigates
+for the ensuing campaign." From half-past eight in the morning till nine
+or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial
+comrades, "saluted by chaff, generally low, personal, and not witty,"
+pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking
+to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be
+as little like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, "across a
+dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses";
+he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by
+himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several
+ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to correspond. But
+not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who
+had made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings,
+unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical. "Sunday,"
+says he, "I generally visit some friends in town, and seem to swim in
+clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get
+back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this
+life." It is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to
+stand it without loss. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good,"
+quoth the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for
+happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life besides, when,
+apart from circumstances, few men are agreeable to their neighbours, and
+still fewer to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had
+arrived, later than common, and even worse provided. The letter from
+which I have quoted is the last of his correspondence with Frank Scott,
+and his last confidential letter to one of his own sex. "If you consider
+it rightly," he wrote long after, "you will find the want of
+correspondence no such strange want in men's friendships. There is,
+believe me, something noble in the metal which does not rust, though not
+burnished by daily use." It is well said; but the last letter to Frank
+Scott is scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the writer has outgrown
+his old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from a
+busy youth of three-and-twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening
+alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope _in vacuo_, the
+lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under
+which youth stands groaning, a voluntary Atlas.
+
+With Fleeming this disease was never seemingly severe. The very day
+before this (to me) distasteful letter, he had written to Miss Bell of
+Manchester in a sweeter strain; I do not quote the one, I quote the
+other; fair things are the best. "I keep my own little lodgings," he
+writes, "but come up every night to see mamma" (who was then on a visit
+to London) "if not kept too late at the works; and have singing-lessons
+once more, and sing 'Donne l'amore e scaltro pargoletto'; and think and
+talk about you; and listen to mamma's projects _de_ Stowting. Everything
+turns to gold at her touch--she's a fairy, and no mistake. We go on
+talking till I have a picture in my head, and can hardly believe at the
+end the original is Stowting. Even you don't know half how good mamma
+is; in other things too, which I must not mention. She teaches me how it
+is not necessary to be very rich to do much good. I begin to understand
+that mamma would find useful occupation and create beauty at the bottom
+of a volcano. She has little weaknesses, but is a real, generous-hearted
+woman, which I suppose is the finest thing in the world." Though neither
+mother nor son could be called beautiful, they make a pretty picture;
+the ugly, generous, ardent woman weaving rainbow illusions; the ugly,
+clear-sighted, loving son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours
+of pleasure, half-beguiled, half-amused, wholly admiring, as he listens.
+But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures fade, and Stowting is once
+more burthened with debt, and the noisy companions and the long hours of
+drudgery once more approach, no wonder if the dirty green seems all the
+dirtier, or if Atlas must resume his load.
+
+But in healthy natures this time of moral teething passes quickly of
+itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh interests; and already, in the
+letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of hope: his friends in
+London, his love for his profession. The last might have saved him; for
+he was ere long to pass into a new sphere, where all his faculties were
+to be tried and exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and
+effort. But it was not left to engineering; another and more influential
+aim was to be set before him. He must, in any case, have fallen in love;
+in any case, his love would have ruled his life; and the question of
+choice was, for the descendant of two such families, a thing of
+paramount importance. Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as
+he was, the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have
+been led far astray. By one of those partialities that fill men at once
+with gratitude and wonder his choosing was directed well. Or are we to
+say that, by a man's choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he
+deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may discern: that a man
+but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his helpmate; and he must in
+part deserve her, or the treasure is but won for a moment to be lost.
+Fleeming chanced, if you will (and indeed all these opportunities are as
+"random as blind-man's-buff"), upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he
+had the wit to know it, the courage to wait and labour for his prize,
+and the tenderness and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes
+precious. Upon this point he has himself written well, as usual with
+fervent optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase) with a truth sticking
+in his head.
+
+"Love," he wrote, "is not an intuition of the person most suitable to
+us, most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears
+fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be
+small indeed; intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would
+then be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love works differently, and in
+its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each strongly desires
+to be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations
+which they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the
+other, tries to fulfil that ideal; each partially succeeds. The greater
+the love, the greater the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more
+durable, the more beautiful the effect. Meanwhile the blindness of each
+to the other's defects enables the transformation to proceed
+[unobserved], so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it ever is, and
+this I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred in the
+person whom they loved. Do not fear, therefore. I do not tell you that
+your friend will not change, but as I am sure that her choice cannot be
+that of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe
+and a good one. Do not fear that anything you love will vanish--he must
+love it too."
+
+Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a letter
+from Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins. This was a family certain to
+interest a thoughtful young man. Alfred, the youngest and least known of
+the Austins, had been a beautiful golden-haired child, petted and kept
+out of the way of both sport and study by a partial mother. Bred an
+attorney, he had (like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and
+was called to the Bar when past thirty. A Commission of Inquiry into the
+state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his
+true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at
+Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato
+famine and the Irish immigration of the 'forties, and finally in London,
+where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He
+was then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's Office
+of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled with perfect
+competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his retirement, in
+1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath. While apprentice to a Norwich
+attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent visitor in the house of Mr.
+Barren, a rallying-place in those days of intellectual society. Edward
+Barren, the son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough,
+was a man typical of the time. When he was a child, he had once been
+patted on the head in his father's shop by no less a man than Samuel
+Johnson, as the Doctor went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale;
+and the child was true to this early consecration. "A life of lettered
+ease spent in provincial retirement," it is thus that the biographer of
+that remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the
+phrase is equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The pair
+were close friends: "W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,"
+writes Barron in his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had moved
+to London, and Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers,
+the latter wrote: "To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you please,
+that I miss him more than I regret him--that I acquiesce in his
+retirement from Norwich, because I could ill brook his observation of my
+increasing debility of mind." This chosen companion of William Taylor
+must himself have been no ordinary man; and he was the friend besides of
+Borrow, whom I find him helping in his Latin. But he had no desire for
+popular distinction, lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield
+of Enfield's "Speaker," and devoted his time to the education of his
+family, in a deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits
+of stoicism, that would surprise a modern. From these children we must
+single out his youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under his care to
+be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without
+outward sign after the manner of the Godwin school. This was the more
+notable, as the girl really derived from the Enfields, whose high-flown
+romantic temper I wish I could find space to illustrate. She was but
+seven years old when Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her;
+and the union thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the husband
+and wife differed, and they did so on momentous subjects, they differed
+with perfect temper and content; and in the conduct of life, and in
+depth and durability of love, they were at one. Each full of high
+spirits, each practised something of the same repression: no sharp word
+was uttered in their house. The same point of honour ruled them: a guest
+was sacred and stood within the pale from criticism. It was a house,
+besides, of unusual intellectual tension. Mrs. Austin remembered, in the
+early days of the marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and
+Alfred, marching to and fro, each with his hands behind his back, and
+"reasoning high" till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would
+cheer their speculations with as many as fifteen cups of tea. And
+though, before the date of Fleeming's visit, the brothers were
+separated, Charles long ago retired from the world at Brandeston, and
+John already near his end in the "rambling old house" at Weybridge,
+Alfred Austin and his wife were still a centre of much intellectual
+society, and still, as indeed they remained until the last, youthfully
+alert in mind. There was but one child of the marriage, Annie, and she
+was herself something new for the eyes of the young visitor; brought up
+as she had been, like her mother before her, to the standard of a man's
+acquirements. Only one art had she been denied, she must not learn the
+violin--the thought was too monstrous even for the Austins; and indeed
+it would seem as if that tide of reform which we may date from the days
+of Mary Wollstonecraft had in some degree even receded; for though Miss
+Austin was suffered to learn Greek, the accomplishment was kept secret
+like a piece of guilt. But whether this stealth was caused by a backward
+movement in public thought since the time of Edward Barron, or by the
+change from enlightened Norwich to barbarian London, I have no means of
+judging.
+
+When Fleeming presented his letter he fell in love at first sight with
+Mrs. Austin and the life and atmosphere of the house. There was in the
+society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to the world,
+something gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity, something
+unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that could not fail to
+hit the fancy of this hot-brained boy. The unbroken enamel of courtesy,
+the self-restraint, the dignified kindness of these married folk, had
+besides a particular attraction for their visitor. He could not but
+compare what he saw with what he knew of his mother and himself.
+Whatever virtues Fleeming possessed, he could never count on being
+civil; whatever brave, true-hearted qualities he was able to admire in
+Mrs. Jenkin, mildness of demeanour was not one of them. And here he
+found persons who were the equals of his mother and himself in intellect
+and width of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity of
+disposition. Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he always loved it. He
+went away from that house struck through with admiration, and vowing to
+himself that his own married life should be upon that pattern, his wife
+(whoever she might be) like Eliza Barron, himself such another husband
+as Alfred Austin. What is more strange, he not only brought away, but
+left behind him, golden opinions. He must have been--he was, I am
+told--a trying lad; but there shone out of him such a light of innocent
+candour, enthusiasm, intelligence, and appreciation, that to persons
+already some way forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently
+the perennial comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful. By a
+pleasant coincidence, there was one person in the house whom he did not
+appreciate, and who did not appreciate him: Annie Austin, his future
+wife. His boyish vanity ruffled her; his appearance, never impressive,
+was then, by reason of obtrusive boyishness, still less so; she found
+occasion to put him in the wrong by correcting a false quantity; and
+when Mr. Austin, after doing his visitor the almost unheard-of honour of
+accompanying him to the door, announced "That was what young men were
+like in my time"--she could only reply, looking on her handsome father,
+"I thought they had been better-looking."
+
+This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it was
+some time before Fleeming began to know his mind; and yet longer ere he
+ventured to show it. The corrected quantity, to those who knew him well,
+will seem to have played its part; he was the man always to reflect over
+a correction and to admire the castigator. And fall in love he did; not
+hurriedly, but step by step, not blindly, but with critical
+discrimination; not in the fashion of Romeo, but, before he was done,
+with all Romeo's ardour and more than Romeo's faith. The high favour to
+which he presently rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife
+might well give him ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present
+and the obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when
+his aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps
+for the only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence. There was indeed
+opening before him a wide door of hope. He had changed into the service
+of Messrs. Liddell and Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in
+the new field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to
+face with his life's work. That impotent sense of his own value, as of a
+ship aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began to fall
+from him. New problems which he was endowed to solve, vistas of new
+inquiry which he was fitted to explore, opened before him continually.
+His gifts had found their avenue and goal. And with this pleasure of
+effective exercise, there must have sprung up at once the hope of what
+is called by the world success. But from these low beginnings, it was a
+far look upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always
+more than problematical to any lover; the consent of parents must be
+always more than doubtful to a young man with a small salary, and no
+capital except capacity and hope. But Fleeming was not the lad to lose
+any good thing for the lack of trial; and at length, in the autumn of
+1857, this boyish-sized, boyish-mannered and superlatively ill-dressed
+young engineer entered the house of the Austins, with such sinkings as
+we may fancy, and asked leave to pay his addresses to the daughter. Mrs.
+Austin already loved him like a son, she was but too glad to give him
+her consent; Mr. Austin reserved the right to inquire into his
+character; from neither was there a word about his prospects, by neither
+was his income mentioned. "Are these people," he wrote, struck with
+wonder at this dignified disinterestedness, "are these people the same
+as other people?" It was not till he was armed with this permission that
+Miss Austin even suspected the nature of his hopes: so strong, in this
+unmannerly boy, was the principle of true courtesy; so powerful, in this
+impetuous nature, the springs of self-repression. And yet a boy he was;
+a boy in heart and mind; and it was with a boy's chivalry and frankness
+that he won his wife. His conduct was a model of honour, hardly of tact;
+to conceal love from the loved one, to court her parents, to be silent
+and discreet till these are won, and then without preparation to
+approach the lady--these are not arts that I would recommend for
+imitation. They lead to final refusal. Nothing saved Fleeming from that
+fate, but one circumstance that cannot be counted upon--the hearty
+favour of the mother, and one gift that is inimitable and that never
+failed him throughout life, the gift of a nature essentially noble and
+outspoken. A happy and high-minded anger flashed through his despair: it
+won for him his wife.
+
+Nearly two years passed before it was possible to marry: two years of
+activity--now in London; now at Birkenhead, fitting out ships, inventing
+new machinery for new purposes, and dipping into electrical experiment;
+now in the _Elba_ on his first telegraph cruise between Sardinia and
+Algiers: a busy and delightful period of bounding ardour, incessant
+toil, growing hope and fresh interests, with behind and through all the
+image of his beloved. A few extracts from his correspondence with his
+betrothed will give the note of these truly joyous years. "My profession
+gives me all the excitement and interest I ever hope for, but the sorry
+jade is obviously jealous of you."--"'Poor Fleeming,' in spite of wet,
+cold, and wind, clambering over moist, tarry slips, wandering among
+pools of slush in waste places inhabited by wandering locomotives, grows
+visibly stronger, has dismissed his office cough and cured his
+toothache."--"The whole of the paying out and lifting machinery must be
+designed and ordered in two or three days, and I am half crazy with
+work. I like it though: it's like a good ball, the excitement carries
+you through."--"I was running to and from the ships and warehouse
+through fierce gusts of rain and wind till near eleven, and you cannot
+think what a pleasure it was to be blown about and think of you in your
+pretty dress."--"I am at the works till ten and sometimes eleven. But I
+have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass
+scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments
+to make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity so
+entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work." And for a last
+taste: "Yesterday I had some charming electrical experiments. What shall
+I compare them to--a new song? a Greek play?"
+
+It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of Professor,
+now Sir William, Thomson.[23] To describe the part played by these two
+in each other's lives would lie out of my way. They worked together on
+the Committee on Electrical Standards; they served together at the
+laying down or the repair of many deep-sea cables; and Sir William was
+regarded by Fleeming, not only with the "worship" (the word is his own)
+due to great scientific gifts, but with an ardour of personal friendship
+not frequently excelled. To their association, Fleeming brought the
+valuable element of a practical understanding; but he never thought or
+spoke of himself where Sir William was in question; and I recall quite
+in his last days a singular instance of this modest loyalty to one whom
+he admired and loved. He drew up a paper, in a quite personal interest,
+of his own services; yet even here he must step out of his way, he must
+add, where it had no claim to be added, his opinion that, in their joint
+work, the contributions of Sir William had been always greatly the most
+valuable. Again, I shall not readily forget with what emotion he once
+told me an incident of their associated travels. On one of the mountain
+ledges of Madeira, Fleeming's pony bolted between Sir William and the
+precipice above; by strange good fortune, and thanks to the steadiness
+of Sir William's horse, no harm was done; but for the moment Fleeming
+saw his friend hurled into the sea, and almost by his own act: it was a
+memory that haunted him.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [23] Afterwards Lord Kelvin.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+
+  1859-1868
+
+   Fleeming's marriage--His married life--Professional
+   difficulties--Life at Claygate--Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin--and of
+   Fleeming--Appointment to the Chair at Edinburgh.
+
+
+On Saturday, Feb. 26, 1859, profiting by a holiday of four days,
+Fleeming was married to Miss Austin at Northiam; a place connected not
+only with his own family but with that of his bride as well. By Tuesday
+morning he was at work again, fitting out cableships at Birkenhead. Of
+the walk from his lodgings to the works I find a graphic sketch in one
+of his letters: "Out over the railway bridge, along a wide road raised
+to the level of a ground floor above the land, which, not being built
+upon, harbours puddles, ponds, pigs, and Irish hovels;--so to the dock
+warehouses, four huge piles of building with no windows, surrounded by a
+wall about twelve feet high;--in through the large gates, round which
+hang twenty or thirty rusty Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting
+for employment;--on along the railway, which came in at the same gates,
+and which branches down between each vast block--past a pilot-engine
+butting refractory trucks into their places--on to the last block, [and]
+down the branch, sniffing the guano-scented air, and detecting the old
+bones. The hartshorn flavour of the guano becomes very strong, as I near
+the docks, where, across the _Elba's_ decks, a huge vessel is
+discharging her cargo of the brown dust, and where huge vessels have
+been discharging that same cargo for the last five months." This was the
+walk he took his young wife on the morrow of his return. She had been
+used to the society of lawyers and civil servants, moving in that
+circle which seems to itself the pivot of the nation, and is in truth
+only a clique like another; and Fleeming was to her the nameless
+assistant of a nameless firm of engineers, doing his inglorious
+business, as she now saw for herself, among unsavoury surroundings. But
+when their walk brought them within view of the river, she beheld a
+sight to her of the most novel beauty: four great sea-going ships
+dressed out with flags. "How lovely!" she cried. "What is it for?" "For
+you," said Fleeming. Her surprise was only equalled by her pleasure. But
+perhaps, for what we may call private fame, there is no life like that
+of the engineer; who is a great man in out-of-the-way places, by the
+dockside or on the desert island, or in populous ships, and remains
+quite unheard of in the coteries of London. And Fleeming had already
+made his mark among the few who had an opportunity of knowing him.
+
+His marriage was the one decisive incident of his career; from that
+moment until the day of his death he had one thought to which all the
+rest were tributary, the thought of his wife. No one could know him even
+slightly, and not remark the absorbing greatness of that sentiment; nor
+can any picture of the man be drawn that does not in proportion dwell
+upon it. This is a delicate task; but if we are to leave behind us (as
+we wish) some presentment of the friend we have lost, it is a task that
+must be undertaken.
+
+For all his play of mind and fancy, for all his indulgence--and, as time
+went on, he grew indulgent--Fleeming had views of duty that were even
+stern. He was too shrewd a student of his fellow-men to remain long
+content with rigid formulae of conduct. Iron-bound, impersonal ethics,
+the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the
+deification of averages. "As to Miss (I declare I forget her name) being
+bad," I find him writing, "people only mean that she has broken the
+Decalogue--which is not at all the same thing. People who have kept in
+the high road of Life really have less opportunity for taking a
+comprehensive view of it than those who have leaped over the hedges and
+strayed up the hills; not but what the hedges are very necessary, and
+our stray travellers often have a weary time of it. So, you may say,
+have those in the dusty roads." Yet he was himself a very stern
+respecter of the hedgerows; sought safety and found dignity in the
+obvious path of conduct; and would palter with no simple and recognised
+duty of his epoch. Of marriage in particular, of the bond so formed, of
+the obligations incurred, of the debt men owe to their children, he
+conceived in a truly antique spirit; not to blame others, but to
+constrain himself. It was not to blame, I repeat, that he held these
+views; for others he could make a large allowance; and yet he tacitly
+expected of his friends and his wife a high standard of behaviour. Nor
+was it always easy to wear the armour of that ideal.
+
+Acting upon these beliefs; conceiving that he had indeed "given himself"
+(in the full meaning of these words) for better, for worse; painfully
+alive to his defects of temper and deficiency in charm; resolute to make
+up for these; thinking last of himself: Fleeming was in some ways the
+very man to have made a noble, uphill fight of an unfortunate marriage.
+In other ways, it is true, he was one of the most unfit for such a
+trial. And it was his beautiful destiny to remain to the last hour the
+same absolute and romantic lover, who had shown to his new bride the
+flag-draped vessels in the Mersey. No fate is altogether easy; but
+trials are our touchstone, trials overcome our reward; and it was given
+to Fleeming to conquer. It was given to him to live for another, not as
+a task, but till the end as an enchanting pleasure. "People may write
+novels," he wrote in 1869, "and other people may write poems, but not a
+man or woman among them can write to say how happy a man may be who is
+desperately in love with his wife after ten years of marriage." And
+again in 1885, after more than twenty-six years of marriage, and within
+but five weeks of his death: "Your first letter from Bournemouth," he
+wrote, "gives me heavenly pleasure--for which I thank Heaven and you
+too--who are my heaven on earth." The mind hesitates whether to say that
+such a man has been more good or more fortunate.
+
+Any woman (it is the defect of her sex) comes sooner to the stable mind
+of maturity than any man; and Jenkin was to the end of a most deliberate
+growth. In the next chapter, when I come to deal with his telegraphic
+voyages and give some taste of his correspondence, the reader will still
+find him at twenty-five an arrant schoolboy. His wife besides was more
+thoroughly educated than he. In many ways she was able to teach him, and
+he proud to be taught; in many ways she outshone him, and he delighted
+to be outshone. All these superiorities, and others that, after the
+manner of lovers, he no doubt forged for himself, added as time went on
+to the humility of his original love. Only once, in all I know of his
+career, did he show a touch of smallness. He could not learn to sing
+correctly; his wife told him so and desisted from her lessons; and the
+mortification was so sharply felt that for years he could not be induced
+to go to a concert, instanced himself as a typical man without an ear,
+and never sang again. I tell it; for the fact that this stood singular
+in his behaviour, and really amazed all who knew him, is the happiest
+way I can imagine to commend the tenor of his simplicity; and because it
+illustrates his feeling for his wife. Others were always welcome to
+laugh at him; if it amused them, or if it amused him, he would proceed
+undisturbed with his occupation, his vanity invulnerable. With his wife
+it was different: his wife had laughed at his singing; and for twenty
+years the fibre ached. Nothing, again, was more notable than the formal
+chivalry of this unmannered man to the person on earth with whom he was
+the most familiar. He was conscious of his own innate and often rasping
+vivacity and roughness; and he was never forgetful of his first visit to
+the Austins and the vow he had registered on his return. There was thus
+an artificial element in his punctilio that at times might almost raise
+a smile. But it stood on noble grounds; for this was how he sought to
+shelter from his own petulance the woman who was to him the symbol of
+the household and to the end the beloved of his youth.
+
+I wish in this chapter to chronicle small beer; taking a hasty glance at
+some ten years of married life and of professional struggle; and
+reserving till the next all the more interesting matter of his cruises.
+Of his achievements and their worth it is not for me to speak: his
+friend and partner, Sir William Thomson, has contributed a note on the
+subject, to which I must refer the reader.[24] He is to conceive in the
+meanwhile for himself Fleeming's manifold engagements: his service on
+the Committee on Electrical Standards, his lectures on electricity at
+Chatham, his Chair at the London University, his partnership with Sir
+William Thomson and Mr. Varley in many ingenious patents, his growing
+credit with engineers and men of science; and he is to bear in mind that
+of all this activity and acquist of reputation, the immediate profit was
+scanty. Soon after his marriage, Fleeming had left the service of
+Messrs. Liddell and Gordon, and entered into a general engineering
+partnership with Mr. Forde, a gentleman in a good way of business. It
+was a fortunate partnership in this, that the parties retained their
+mutual respect unlessened and separated with regret; but men's affairs,
+like men, have their times of sickness, and by one of those
+unaccountable variations, for hard upon ten years the business was
+disappointing and the profits meagre. "Inditing drafts of German
+railways which will never get made": it is thus I find Fleeming, not
+without a touch of bitterness, describe his occupation. Even the patents
+hung fire at first. There was no salary to rely on; children were coming
+and growing up; the prospect was often anxious. In the days of his
+courtship, Fleeming had written to Miss Austin a dissuasive picture of
+the trials of poverty, assuring her these were no figments but truly
+bitter to support; he told her this, he wrote beforehand, so that when
+the pinch came and she suffered, she should not be disappointed in
+herself nor tempted to doubt her own magnanimity: a letter of admirable
+wisdom and solicitude. But now that the trouble came, he bore it very
+lightly. It was his principle, as he once prettily expressed it, "to
+enjoy each day's happiness, as it arises, like birds or children." His
+optimism, if driven out at the door, would come in again by the window;
+if it found nothing but blackness in the present, would hit upon some
+ground of consolation in the future or the past. And his courage and
+energy were indefatigable. In the year 1863, soon after the birth of
+their first son, they moved into a cottage at Claygate near Esher; and
+about this time, under manifold troubles both of money and health, I
+find him writing from abroad: "The country will give us, please God,
+health and strength. I will love and cherish you more than ever, you
+shall go where you wish, you shall receive whom you wish--and as for
+money, you shall have that too. I cannot be mistaken. I have now
+measured myself with many men. I do not feel weak, I do not feel that I
+shall fail. In many things I have succeeded, and I will in this. And
+meanwhile the time of waiting, which, please Heaven, shall not be long,
+shall also not be so bitter. Well, well, I promise much, and do not know
+at this moment how you and the dear child are. If he is but better,
+courage, my girl, for I see light."
+
+This cottage at Claygate stood just without the village, well surrounded
+with trees, and commanding a pleasant view. A piece of the garden was
+turfed over to form a croquet-green, and Fleeming became (I need scarce
+say) a very ardent player. He grew ardent, too, in gardening. This he
+took up at first to please his wife, having no natural inclination; but
+he had no sooner set his hand to it than, like everything else he
+touched, it became with him a passion. He budded roses, he potted
+cuttings in the coach-house; if there came a change of weather at night
+he would rise out of bed to protect his favourites; when he was thrown
+with a dull companion, it was enough for him to discover in the man a
+fellow-gardener; on his travels, he would go out of his way to visit
+nurseries and gather hints; and to the end of his life, after other
+occupations prevented him putting his own hand to the spade, he drew up
+a yearly programme for his gardener, in which all details were
+regulated. He had begun by this time to write. His paper on Darwin,
+which had the merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself,
+had indeed been written before this, in London lodgings; but his pen was
+not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that
+review of "Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics," which
+Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second
+edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity
+of the most incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a
+whole review borrowed and reprinted by Matthews Duncan, are compliments
+of a rare strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been
+precious indeed. There was yet a third of the same kind in store for
+him; and when Munro himself owned that he had found instruction in the
+paper on Lucretius, we may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the
+Capitol of reviewing.
+
+Croquet, charades, Christmas magic lanterns for the village children, an
+amateur concert or a review article in the evening; plenty of hard work
+by day; regular visits to meetings of the British Association, from one
+of which I find him characteristically writing: "I cannot say that I
+have had any amusement yet, but I am enjoying the dulness and dry bustle
+of the whole thing"; occasional visits abroad on business, when he would
+find the time to glean (as I have said) gardening hints for himself, and
+old folk-songs or new fashions of dress for his wife; and the continual
+study and care of his children: these were the chief elements of his
+life. Nor were friends wanting. Captain and Mrs. Jenkin, Mr. and Mrs.
+Austin, Clerk Maxwell, Miss Bell of Manchester, and others, came to them
+on visits. Mr. Hertslet of the Foreign Office, his wife and his
+daughter, were neighbours, and proved kind friends; in 1867 the Howitts
+came to Claygate and sought the society of "the two bright, clever young
+people";[25] and in a house close by Mr. Frederick Ricketts came to live
+with his family. Mr. Ricketts was a valued friend during his short life;
+and when he was lost, with every circumstance of heroism, in the _La
+Plata_, Fleeming mourned him sincerely.
+
+I think I shall give the best idea of Fleeming in this time of his early
+married life, by a few sustained extracts from his letters to his wife,
+while she was absent on a visit in 1864.
+
+  "_Nov. 11._--Sunday was too wet to walk to Isleworth, for which I was
+  sorry, so I stayed and went to church and thought of you at Ardwick
+  all through the Commandments, and heard Dr. ---- expound in a
+  remarkable way a prophecy of St. Paul about Roman Catholics, which,
+  _mutatis mutandis_, would do very well for Protestants in some parts.
+  Then I made a little nursery of borecole and Enfield market cabbage,
+  grubbing in wet earth with leggings and grey coat on. Then I tidied up
+  the coach-house to my own and Christine's admiration. Then encouraged
+  by _bouts-rimes_ I wrote you a copy of verses; high time, I think; I
+  shall just save my tenth year of knowing my lady love without inditing
+  poetry or rhymes to her.
+
+  "Then I rummaged over the box with my father's letters, and found
+  interesting notes from myself. One I should say my first letter, which
+  little Austin I should say would rejoice to see, and shall see--with a
+  drawing of a cottage and a spirited 'cob.' What was more to the
+  purpose, I found with it a paste-cutter which Mary begged humbly for
+  Christine, and I generously gave this morning.
+
+  "Then I read some of Congreve. There are admirable scenes in the
+  manner of Sheridan; all wit and no character, or rather one character
+  in a great variety of situations and scenes. I could show you some
+  scenes, but others are too coarse even for my stomach, hardened by a
+  course of French novels.
+
+  "All things look so happy for the rain.
+
+  "_Nov. 16._--Verbenas looking well.... I am but a poor creature
+  without you; I have naturally no spirit or fun or enterprise in me.
+  Only a kind of mechanical capacity for ascertaining whether two really
+  is half four, etc.; but when you are near me I can fancy that I too
+  shine, and vainly suppose it to be my proper light; whereas by my
+  extreme darkness when you are not by, it clearly can only be by a
+  reflected brilliance that I seem aught but dull. Then for the moral
+  part of me: if it were not for you and little Odden, I should feel by
+  no means sure that I had any affection power in me.... Even the
+  muscular me suffers a sad deterioration in your absence. I don't get
+  up when I ought to, I have snoozed in my chair after dinner; I do not
+  go in at the garden with my wonted vigour, and feel ten times as tired
+  as usual with a walk in your absence; so you see, when you are not by,
+  I am a person without ability, affections, or vigour, but droop, dull,
+  selfish, and spiritless; can you wonder that I love you?
+
+  "_Nov. 17._--... I am very glad we married young. I would not have
+  missed these five years--no, not for any hopes; they are my own.
+
+  "_Nov. 30._--I got through my Chatham lecture very fairly, though
+  almost all my apparatus went astray. I dined at the mess, and got home
+  to Isleworth the same evening; your father very kindly sitting up for
+  me.
+
+  "_Dec. 1._--Back at dear Claygate. Many cuttings flourish, especially
+  those which do honour to your hand. Your Californian annuals are up
+  and about. Badger is fat, the grass green....
+
+  "_Dec. 3._--Odden will not talk of you, while you are away, having
+  inherited, as I suspect, his father's way of declining to consider a
+  subject which is painful, as your absence is.... I certainly should
+  like to learn Greek, and I think it would be a capital pastime for the
+  long winter evenings.... How things are misrated! I declare croquet is
+  a noble occupation compared to the pursuits of business men. As for
+  so-called idleness--that is, one form of it--I vow it is the noblest
+  aim of man. When idle, one can love, one can be good, feel kindly to
+  all, devote oneself to others, be thankful for existence, educate
+  one's mind, one's heart, one's body. When busy, as I am busy now or
+  have been busy to-day, one feels just as you sometimes felt when you
+  were too busy, owing to want of servants.
+
+  "_Dec. 5._--On Sunday I was at Isleworth, chiefly engaged in playing
+  with Odden. We had the most enchanting walk together through the
+  brickfields. It was very muddy, and, as he remarked, not fit for
+  Nanna, but fit for us _men_. The dreary waste of bared earth, thatched
+  sheds and standing water was a paradise to him; and when we walked up
+  planks to deserted mixing and crushing mills, and actually saw where
+  the clay was stirred with long iron prongs, and chalk or lime ground
+  with 'a tind of a mill,' his expression of contentment and triumphant
+  heroism knew no limit to its beauty. Of course on returning I found
+  Mrs. Austin looking out at the door in an anxious manner, and thinking
+  we had been out quite long enough.... I am reading Don Quixote
+  chiefly, and am his fervent admirer, but I am so sorry he did not
+  place his affections on a Dulcinea of somewhat worthier stamp. In fact
+  I think there must be a mistake about it. Don Quixote might and would
+  serve his lady in most preposterous fashion, but I am sure he would
+  have chosen a lady of merit. He imagined her to be such, no doubt,
+  and drew a charming picture of her occupations by the banks of the
+  river; but in his other imaginations there was some kind of peg on
+  which to hang the false costumes he created; windmills are big, and
+  wave their arms like giants; sheep in the distance are somewhat like
+  an army; a little boat on the river-side must look much the same
+  whether enchanted or belonging to millers; but except that Dulcinea is
+  a woman, she bears no resemblance at all to the damsel of his
+  imagination."
+
+At the time of these letters the oldest son only was born to them. In
+September of the next year, with the birth of the second, Charles
+Frewen, there befell Fleeming a terrible alarm, and what proved to be a
+lifelong misfortune. Mrs. Jenkin was taken suddenly and alarmingly ill;
+Fleeming ran a matter of two miles to fetch the doctor, and, drenched
+with sweat as he was, returned with him at once in an open gig. On their
+arrival at the house, Mrs. Jenkin half unconsciously took and kept hold
+of her husband's hand. By the doctor's orders, windows and doors were
+set open to create a thorough draught, and the patient was on no account
+to be disturbed. Thus, then, did Fleeming pass the whole of that night,
+crouching on the floor in the draught, and not daring to move lest he
+should wake the sleeper. He had never been strong; energy had stood him
+in stead of vigour; and the result of that night's exposure was flying
+rheumatism varied with settled sciatica. Sometimes it quite disabled
+him, sometimes it was less acute; but he was rarely free from it until
+his death. I knew him for many years; for more than ten we were closely
+intimate; I have lived with him for weeks; and during all this time he
+only once referred to his infirmity, and then perforce, as an excuse for
+some trouble he put me to, and so slightly worded that I paid no heed.
+This is a good measure of his courage under sufferings of which none but
+the untried will think lightly. And I think it worth noting how this
+optimist was acquainted with pain. It will seem strange only to the
+superficial. The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles,
+which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well. Nor
+does it readily spring at all, in minds that have conceived of life as
+a field of ordered duties, not as a chase in which to hunt for
+gratifications. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good"; I wish he
+had mended the phrase: "We are not here to be happy, but to try to be
+good," comes nearer the modesty of truth. With such old-fashioned
+morality it is possible to get through life, and see the worst of it,
+and feel some of the worst of it, and still acquiesce piously and even
+gladly in man's fate. Feel some of the worst of it, I say; for some of
+the rest of the worst is, by this simple faith, excluded.
+
+It was in the year 1868 that the clouds finally rose. The business in
+partnership with Mr. Forde began suddenly to pay well; about the same
+time the patents showed themselves a valuable property; and but a little
+after, Fleeming was appointed to the new Chair of Engineering in the
+University of Edinburgh. Thus, almost at once, pecuniary embarrassments
+passed for ever out of his life. Here is his own epilogue to the time at
+Claygate, and his anticipations of the future in Edinburgh:--
+
+  "... The dear old house at Claygate is not let, and the pretty garden
+  a mass of weeds. I feel rather as if we had behaved unkindly to them.
+  We were very happy there, but now that it is over I am conscious of
+  the weight of anxiety as to money which I bore all the time. With you
+  in the garden, with Austin in the coach-house, with pretty songs in
+  the little low white room, with the moonlight in the dear room
+  upstairs,--ah, it was perfect; but the long walk, wondering,
+  pondering, fearing, scheming, and the dusty jolting railway, and the
+  horrid fusty office with its endless disappointments, they are well
+  gone. It is well enough to fight and scheme, and bustle about in the
+  eager crowd here [in London] for a while now and then, but not for a
+  lifetime. What I have now is just perfect. Study for winter, action
+  for summer, lovely country for recreation, a pleasant town for
+  talk...."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [24] The note by Lord Kelvin, appended in 1887 to the original edition
+    of this Memoir, is not included in the present edition.--ED.
+
+  [25] "Reminiscences of My Later Life," by Mary Howitt, _Good Words_,
+    May 1886.
+
+
+
+
+  CHAPTER V
+
+  NOTES OF TELEGRAPH VOYAGES, 1858-1873
+
+
+But it is now time to see Jenkin at his life's work. I have before me
+certain imperfect series of letters written, as he says, "at hazard, for
+one does not know at the time what is important and what is not": the
+earlier addressed to Miss Austin, after the betrothal; the later to Mrs.
+Jenkin, the young wife. I should premise that I have allowed myself
+certain editorial freedoms, leaving out and splicing together, much as
+he himself did with the Bona cable: thus edited the letters speak for
+themselves, and will fail to interest none who love adventure or
+activity. Addressed as they were to her whom he called his "dear
+engineering pupil," they give a picture of his work so clear that a
+child may understand, and so attractive that I am half afraid their
+publication may prove harmful, and still further crowd the ranks of a
+profession already overcrowded. But their most engaging quality is the
+picture of the writer; with his indomitable self-confidence and courage,
+his readiness in every pinch of circumstance or change of plan, and his
+ever fresh enjoyment of the whole web of human experience, nature,
+adventure, science, toil and rest, society and solitude. It should be
+borne in mind that the writer of these buoyant pages was, even while he
+wrote, harassed by responsibility, stinted in sleep, and often
+struggling with the prostration of sea-sickness. To this last enemy,
+which he never overcame, I have omitted, in my search after
+condensation, a good many references; if they were all left, such was
+the man's temper, they would not represent one hundredth part of what he
+suffered, for he was never given to complaint. But indeed he had met
+this ugly trifle, as he met every thwart circumstance of life, with a
+certain pleasure of pugnacity; and suffered it not to check him, whether
+in the exercise of his profession or the pursuit of amusement.
+
+
+  I
+
+    _"Birkenhead. April 18, 1858._
+
+  "Well, you should know, Mr. ---- having a contract to lay down a
+  submarine telegraph from Sardinia to Africa failed three times in the
+  attempt. The distance from land to land is about 140 miles. On the
+  first occasion, after proceeding some 70 miles, he had to cut the
+  cable--the cause I forget; he tried again, same result; then picked up
+  about 20 miles of the lost cable, spliced on a new piece, and very
+  nearly got across that time, but ran short of cable, and, when but a
+  few miles off Galita in very deep water, had to telegraph to London
+  for more cable to be manufactured and sent out whilst he tried to
+  stick to the end: for five days, I think, he lay there sending and
+  receiving messages, but, heavy weather coming on, the cable parted and
+  Mr. ---- went home in despair--at least I should think so.
+
+  "He then applied to those eminent engineers, R. S. Newall and Co., who
+  made and laid down a cable for him last autumn--Fleeming Jenkin (at
+  the time in considerable mental agitation) having the honour of
+  fitting out the _Elba_ for that purpose." [On this occasion, the
+  _Elba_ has no cable to lay; but] "is going out in the beginning of May
+  to endeavour to fish up the cables Mr. ---- lost. There are two ends
+  at or near the shore: the third will probably not be found within 20
+  miles from land. One of these ends will be passed over a very big
+  pulley or sheave at the bows, passed six times round a big barrel or
+  drum; which will be turned round by a steam-engine on deck, and thus
+  wind up the cable, while the _Elba_ slowly steams ahead. The cable is
+  not wound round and round the drum as your silk is wound on its reel,
+  but on the contrary never goes round more than six times, going off at
+  one side as it comes on at the other, and going down into the hold of
+  the _Elba_, to be coiled along in a big coil or skein.
+
+  "I went down to Gateshead to discuss with Mr. Newall the form which
+  this tolerably simple idea should take, and have been busy since I
+  came here drawing, ordering, and putting up the
+  machinery--uninterfered with, thank goodness, by any one. I own I like
+  responsibility; it flatters one, and then, your father might say, I
+  have more to gain than to lose. Moreover I do like this bloodless,
+  painless combat with wood and iron, forcing the stubborn rascals to do
+  my will, licking the clumsy cubs into an active shape, seeing the
+  child of to-day's thought working to-morrow in full vigour at his
+  appointed task.
+
+
+    "_May 12._
+
+  "By dint of bribing, bullying, cajoling, and going day by day to see
+  the state of things ordered, all my work is very nearly ready now; but
+  those who have neglected these precautions are of course disappointed.
+  Five hundred fathoms of chain [were] ordered by ---- some three weeks
+  since, to be ready by the 10th without fail; he sends for it
+  to-day--150 fathoms all they can let us have by the 15th--and how the
+  rest is to be got, who knows? He ordered a boat a month since, and
+  yesterday we could see nothing of her but the keel and about two
+  planks. I could multiply instances without end. At first one goes
+  nearly mad with vexation at these things; but one finds so soon that
+  they are the rule, that then it becomes necessary to feign a rage one
+  does not feel. I look upon it as the natural order of things, that if
+  I order a thing, it will not be done--if by accident it gets done, it
+  will certainly be done wrong; the only remedy being to watch the
+  performance at every stage.
+
+  "To-day was a grand field-day. I had steam up and tried the engine
+  against pressure or resistance. One part of the machinery is driven by
+  belt or strap of leather. I always had my doubts this might slip; and
+  so it did, wildly. I had made provision for doubling it, putting on
+  two belts instead of one. No use--off they went, slipping round and
+  off the pulleys instead of driving the machinery. Tighten them--no
+  use. More strength there--down with the lever--smash something, tear
+  the belts, but get them tight--now then stand clear, on with the
+  steam;--and the belts slip away, as if nothing held them. Men begin to
+  look queer; the circle of quidnuncs make sage remarks. Once more--no
+  use. I begin to know I ought to feel sheepish and beat, but somehow I
+  feel cocky instead, I laugh and say, 'Well, I am bound to break
+  something down'--and suddenly see. 'Oho, there's the place; get weight
+  on there, and the belt won't slip.' With much labour, on go the belts
+  again. 'Now then, a spar thro' there and six men's weight on; mind
+  you're not carried away.' 'Ay, ay, sir.' But evidently no one believes
+  in the plan. 'Hurrah, round she goes--stick to your spar. All right,
+  shut off steam.' And the difficulty is vanquished.
+
+  "This, or such as this (not always quite so bad), occurs hour after
+  hour, while five hundred tons of coal are rattling down into the holds
+  and bunkers, riveters are making their infernal row all round, and
+  riggers bend the sails and fit the rigging:--a sort of Pandemonium, it
+  appeared to young Mrs. Newall, who was here on Monday and half choked
+  with guano; but it suits the likes of me.
+
+
+    "_SS. Elba, River Mersey, May 17._
+
+  "We are delayed in the river by some of the ship's papers not being
+  ready. Such a scene at the dock gates. Not a sailor will join till the
+  last moment; and then, just as the ship forges ahead through the
+  narrow pass, beds and baggage fly on board, the men, half tipsy,
+  clutch at the rigging, the captain swears, the women scream and sob,
+  the crowd cheer and laugh, while one or two pretty little girls stand
+  still and cry outright, regardless of all eyes.
+
+  "These two days of comparative peace have quite set me on my legs
+  again. I was getting worn and weary with anxiety and work. As usual I
+  have been delighted with my shipwrights. I gave them some beer on
+  Saturday, making a short oration. To-day when they went ashore, and I
+  came on board, they gave three cheers, whether for me or the ship I
+  hardly know, but I had just bid them good-bye, and the ship was out of
+  hail; but I was startled and hardly liked to claim the compliment by
+  acknowledging it.
+
+
+    "_SS. Elba, May 25._
+
+  "My first intentions of a long journal have been fairly frustrated by
+  sea-sickness. On Tuesday last about noon we started from the Mersey in
+  very dirty weather, and were hardly out of the river when we met a
+  gale from the south-west and a heavy sea, both right in our teeth; and
+  the poor _Elba_ had a sad shaking. Had I not been very sea-sick, the
+  sight would have been exciting enough as I sat wrapped in my oilskins
+  on the bridge; [but] in spite of all my efforts to talk, to eat, and
+  to grin, I soon collapsed into imbecility; and I was heartily thankful
+  towards evening to find myself in bed.
+
+  "Next morning I fancied it grew quieter, and, as I listened, heard,
+  'Let go the anchor,' whereon I concluded we had run into Holyhead
+  Harbour, as was indeed the case. All that day we lay in Holyhead, but
+  I could neither read nor write nor draw. The captain of another
+  steamer which had put in came on board, and we all went for a walk on
+  the hill; and in the evening there was an exchange of presents. We
+  gave some tobacco, I think, and received a cat, two pounds of fresh
+  butter, a Cumberland ham, 'Westward Ho!' and Thackeray's 'English
+  Humourists.' I was astonished at receiving two such fair books from
+  the captain of a little coasting screw. Our captain said he [the
+  captain of the screw] had plenty of money, five or six hundred a year
+  at least. 'What in the world makes him go rolling about in such a
+  craft, then?' 'Why, I fancy he's reckless; he's desperate in love with
+  that girl I mentioned, and she won't look at him.' Our honest, fat,
+  old captain says this very grimly in his thick, broad voice.
+
+  "My head won't stand much writing yet, so I will run up and take a
+  look at the blue night sky off the coast of Portugal.
+
+
+    "_May 26._
+
+  "A nice lad of some two-and-twenty, A---- by name, goes out in a
+  nondescript capacity as part purser, part telegraph clerk, part
+  generally useful person. A---- was a great comfort during the miseries
+  [of the gale]; for when with a dead head wind and a heavy sea, plates,
+  books, papers, stomachs were being rolled about in sad confusion, we
+  generally managed to lie on our backs, and grin, and try discordant
+  staves of the 'Flowers of the Forest' and the 'Low-backed Car.' We
+  could sing and laugh, when we could do nothing else; though A---- was
+  ready to swear after each fit was past, that that was the first time
+  he had felt anything, and at this moment would declare in broad Scotch
+  that he'd never been sick at all, qualifying the oath with 'except for
+  a minute now and then.' He brought a cornet-a-piston to practise on,
+  having had three weeks' instructions on that melodious instrument; and
+  if you could hear the horrid sounds that come I especially at heavy
+  rolls. When I hint he is not improving, there comes a confession: 'I
+  don't feel quite right yet, you see!' But he blows away manfully, and
+  in self-defence I try to roar the tune louder.
+
+    "11.30 P.M.
+
+  "Long past Cape St. Vincent now. We went within about 400 yards of the
+  cliffs and lighthouse in a calm moonlight, with porpoises springing
+  from the sea, the men crooning long ballads as they lay idle on the
+  forecastle, and the sails flapping uncertain on the yards. As we
+  passed, there came a sudden breeze from land, hot and heavy-scented;
+  and now as I write its warm rich flavour contrasts strongly with the
+  salt air we have been breathing.
+
+  "I paced the deck with H----, the second mate, and in the quiet night
+  drew a confession that he was engaged to be married, and gave him a
+  world of good advice. He is a very nice, active, little fellow, with a
+  broad Scotch tongue and 'dirty, little rascal' appearance. He had a
+  sad disappointment at starting. Having been second mate on the last
+  voyage, when the first mate was discharged, he took charge of the
+  _Elba_ all the time she was in port, and of course looked forward to
+  being chief mate this trip. Liddell promised him the post. He had not
+  authority to do this; and when Newall heard of it, he appointed
+  another man. Fancy poor H---- having told all the men and, most of all,
+  his sweetheart! But more remains behind; for when it came to signing
+  articles, it turned out that O----, the new first mate, had not a
+  certificate which allowed him to have a second mate. Then came rather
+  an affecting scene. For H---- proposed to sign as chief (he having the
+  necessary higher certificate) but to act as second for the lower
+  wages. At first O---- would not give in, but offered to go as second.
+  But our brave little H---- said, no: 'The owners wished Mr. O---- to
+  be chief mate, and chief mate he should be.' So he carried the day,
+  signed as chief and acts as second. Shakespeare and Byron are his
+  favourite books. I walked into Byron a little, but can well understand
+  his stirring up a rough, young sailor's romance. I lent him 'Westward
+  Ho!' from the cabin; but to my astonishment he did not care much for
+  it; he said it smelt of the shilling railway library; perhaps I had
+  praised it too highly. Scott is his standard for novels. I am very
+  happy to find good taste by no means confined to gentlemen, H----
+  having no pretensions to that title. He is a man after my own heart.
+
+  "Then I came down to the cabin and heard young A----'s schemes for the
+  future. His highest picture is a commission in the Prince of
+  Vizianagram's irregular horse. His eldest brother is tutor to his
+  Highness's children, and grand vizier, and magistrate, and on his
+  Highness's household staff, and seems to be one of those Scotch
+  adventurers one meets with and hears of in queer berths--raising
+  cavalry, building palaces, and using some petty Eastern king's long
+  purse with their long Scotch heads.
+
+
+    "_Off Bona, June 4._
+
+  "I read your letter carefully, leaning back in a Maltese boat to
+  present the smallest surface of my body to a grilling sun, and sailing
+  from the _Elba_ to Cape Hamrah, about three miles distant. How we
+  fried and sighed! At last we reached land under Fort Geneva, and I was
+  carried ashore pick-a-back, and plucked the first flower I saw for
+  Annie. It was a strange scene, far more novel than I had imagined; the
+  high, steep banks covered with rich, spicy vegetation, of which I
+  hardly knew one plant. The dwarf palm with fan-like leaves, growing
+  about two feet high, formed the staple of the verdure. As we brushed
+  through them, the gummy leaves of a cistus stuck to the clothes: and
+  with its small white flower and yellow heart stood for our English
+  dog-rose. In place of heather, we had myrtle and lentisque with leaves
+  somewhat similar. That large bulb with long flat leaves? Do not touch
+  it if your hands are cut; the Arabs use it as blisters for their
+  horses. Is that the same sort? No, take that one up; it is the bulb of
+  a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted,
+  like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the
+  leaves we get a vegetable horsehair;--and eat the bottom of the centre
+  spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here
+  a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling
+  by abused civilisation:--fine hardy thistles, one of them bright
+  yellow, though;--honest, Scotch-looking, large daisies or
+  gowans;--potatoes here and there, looking but sickly; and dark sturdy
+  fig-trees, looking cool and at their ease in the burning sun.
+
+  "Here we are at Fort Genova, crowning the little point, a small old
+  building due to my old Genoese acquaintance who fought and traded
+  bravely once upon a time. A broken cannon of theirs forms the
+  threshold; and through a dark, low arch we enter upon broad terraces
+  sloping to the centre, from which rain-water may collect and run into
+  that well. Large-breeched French troopers lounge about and are most
+  civil; and the whole party sit down to breakfast in a little
+  white-washed room, from the door of which the long, mountain coastline
+  and the sparkling sea show of an impossible blue through the openings
+  of a white-washed rampart. I try a sea-egg, one of those prickly
+  fellows--sea-urchins, they are called sometimes; the shell is of a
+  lovely purple, and when opened there are rays of yellow adhering to
+  the inside; these I eat, but they are very fishy.
+
+  "We are silent and shy of one another, and soon go out to watch while
+  turbaned, blue-breeched, bare-legged Arabs dig holes for the land
+  telegraph posts on the following principle: one man takes a pick and
+  bangs lazily at the hard earth; when a little is loosened, his mate
+  with a small spade lifts it on one side; and _da capo_. They have
+  regular features, and look quite in place among the palms. Our English
+  workmen screw the earthenware insulators on the posts, strain the
+  wire, and order the Arabs about by the generic term of Johnny. I find
+  W---- has nothing for me to do; and that in fact no one has anything
+  to do. Some instruments for testing have stuck at Lyons, some at
+  Cagliari; and nothing can be done--or, at any rate, is done. I wander
+  about, thinking of you and staring at big, green
+  grasshoppers--locusts, some people call them--and smelling the rich
+  brushwood. There was nothing for a pencil to sketch, and I soon got
+  tired of this work, though I have paid willingly much money for far
+  less strange and lovely sights.
+
+
+    "_Off Cape Spartivento, June 8._
+
+  "At two this morning we left Cagliari; at five cast anchor here. I got
+  up and began preparing for the final trial; and shortly afterwards
+  every one else of note on board went ashore to make experiments on the
+  state of the cable, leaving me with the prospect of beginning to lift
+  at 12 o'clock. I was not ready by that time; but the experiments were
+  not concluded, and moreover the cable was found to be imbedded some
+  four or five feet in sand, so that the boat could not bring off the
+  end. At three, Messrs. Liddell, etc., came on board in good spirits,
+  having found two wires good, or in such a state as permitted messages
+  to be transmitted freely. The boat now went to grapple for the cable
+  some way from shore, while the _Elba_ towed a small lateen craft which
+  was to take back the consul to Cagliari some distance on its way. On
+  our return we found the boat had been unsuccessful; she was allowed to
+  drop astern, while we grappled for the cable in the _Elba_ [without
+  more success]. The coast is a low mountain range covered with
+  brushwood or heather--pools of water and a sandy beach at their feet.
+  I have not yet been ashore, my hands having been very full all day.
+
+
+    "_June 9._
+
+  "Grappling for the cable outside the bank had been voted too
+  uncertain; [and the day was spent in] efforts to pull the cable off
+  through the sand which has accumulated over it. By getting the cable
+  tight on to the boat, and letting the swell pitch her about till it
+  got slack, and then tightening again with blocks and pulleys, we
+  managed to get out from the beach towards the ship at the rate of
+  about twenty yards an hour. When they had got about 100 yards from
+  shore, we ran in round the _Elba_ to try and help them, letting go the
+  anchor in the shallowest possible water; this was about sunset.
+  Suddenly some one calls out he sees the cable at the bottom: there it
+  was, sure enough, apparently wriggling about as the waves rippled.
+  Great excitement; still greater when we find our own anchor is foul of
+  it and it has been the means of bringing it to light. We let go a
+  grapnel, get the cable clear of the anchor on to the grapnel--the
+  captain in an agony lest we should drift ashore meanwhile--hand the
+  grappling line into the big boat, steam out far enough, and anchor
+  again. A little more work and one end of the cable is up over the bows
+  round my drum. I go to my engine and we start hauling in. All goes
+  pretty well, but it is quite dark. Lamps are got at last, and men
+  arranged. We go on for a quarter of a mile or so from shore and then
+  stop at about half-past nine with orders to be up at three. Grand work
+  at last! A number of the _Saturday Review_ here: it reads so hot and
+  feverish, so tomb-like and unhealthy, in the midst of dear Nature's
+  hills and sea, with good wholesome work to do. Pray that all go well
+  to-morrow.
+
+
+    "_June 10._
+
+  "Thank heaven for a most fortunate day. At three o'clock this morning,
+  in a damp, chill mist, all hands were roused to work. With a small
+  delay, for one or two improvements I had seen to be necessary last
+  night, the engine started, and since that time I do not think there
+  has been half an hour's stoppage. A rope to splice, a block to change,
+  a wheel to oil, an old rusted anchor to disengage from the cable which
+  brought it up, these have been our only obstructions. Sixty, seventy,
+  eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty revolutions at last, my little
+  engine tears away. The even black rope comes straight out of the blue
+  heaving water; passes slowly round an open-hearted,
+  good-tempered-looking pulley, five feet diameter; aft past a vicious
+  nipper, to bring all up should anything go wrong; through a gentle
+  guide; on to a huge bluff drum, who wraps him round his body and says,
+  'Come you must,' as plain as drum can speak: the chattering pauls say,
+  'I've got him, I've got him, he can't get back': whilst black cable,
+  much slacker and easier in mind and body, is taken by a slim V-pulley
+  and passed down into the huge hold, where half a dozen men put him
+  comfortably to bed after his exertion in rising from his long bath. In
+  good sooth, it is one of the strangest sights I know to see that black
+  fellow rising up so steadily in the midst of the blue sea. We are more
+  than half way to the place where we expect the fault; and already the
+  one wire, supposed previously to be quite bad near the African coast,
+  can be spoken through. I am very glad I am here, for my machines are
+  my own children, and I look on their little failings with a parent's
+  eye and lead them into the path of duty with gentleness and firmness.
+  I am naturally in good spirits, but keep very quiet, for misfortunes
+  may arise at any instant; moreover, to-morrow my paying-out apparatus
+  will be wanted should all go well, and that will be another nervous
+  operation. Fifteen miles are safely in; but no one knows better than I
+  do that nothing is done till all is done.
+
+
+    "_June 11._
+
+  "9 A.M.--We have reached the splice supposed to be faulty, and no
+  fault has been found. The two men learned in electricity, L---- and
+  W----, squabble where the fault is.
+
+  "_Evening._--A weary day in a hot broiling sun; no air. After the
+  experiments, L---- said the fault might be ten miles ahead; by that
+  time we should be, according to a chart, in about a thousand fathoms
+  of water--rather more than a mile. It was most difficult to decide
+  whether to go on or not. I made preparations for a heavy pull, set
+  small things to rights and went to sleep. About four in the afternoon,
+  Mr. Liddell decided to proceed, and we are now (at seven) grinding in
+  at the rate of a mile and three-quarters per hour, which appears a
+  grand speed to us. If the paying-out only works well. I have just
+  thought of a great improvement in it; I can't apply it this time,
+  however.--The sea is of an oily calm, and a perfect fleet of brigs and
+  ships surrounds us, their sails hardly filling in the lazy breeze. The
+  sun sets behind the dim coast of the Isola San Pietro, the coast of
+  Sardinia high and rugged becomes softer and softer in the distance,
+  while to the westward still the isolated rock of Toro springs from the
+  horizon.--It would amuse you to see how cool (in head) and jolly
+  everybody is. A testy word now and then shows the wires are strained a
+  little, but every one laughs and makes his little jokes as if it were
+  all in fun: yet we are all as much in earnest as the most earnest of
+  the earnest bastard German school or demonstrative of Frenchmen. I
+  enjoy it very much.
+
+
+    "_June 12._
+
+  "5.30 A.M.--Out of sight of land: about thirty nautical miles in the
+  hold; the wind rising a little; experiments being made for a fault,
+  while the engine slowly revolves to keep us hanging at the same spot:
+  depth supposed about a mile. The machinery has behaved admirably. O
+  that the paying-out were over! The new machinery there is but rough,
+  meant for an experiment in shallow water, and here we are in a mile of
+  water.
+
+  "6.30.--I have made my calculations and find the new paying-out gear
+  cannot possibly answer at this depth, some portion would give way.
+  Luckily, I have brought the old things with me and am getting them
+  rigged up as fast as may be. Bad news from the cable. Number four has
+  given in some portion of the last ten miles: the fault in number three
+  is still at the bottom of the sea; number two is now the only good
+  wire; and the hold is getting in such a mess, through keeping bad bits
+  out and cutting for splicing and testing, that there will be great
+  risk in paying out. The cable is somewhat strained in its ascent from
+  one mile below us; what it will be when we get to two miles is a
+  problem we may have to determine.
+
+  "9 P.M.--A most provoking, unsatisfactory day. We have done nothing.
+  The wind and sea have both risen. Too little notice has been given to
+  the telegraphists who accompany this expedition; they had to leave all
+  their instruments at Lyons in order to arrive at Bona in time; our
+  tests are therefore of the roughest, and no one really knows where the
+  faults are. Mr. L---- in the morning lost much time; then he told us,
+  after we had been inactive for about eight hours, that the fault in
+  number three was within six miles; and at six o'clock in the evening,
+  when all was ready for a start to pick up these six miles, he comes
+  and says there must be a fault about thirty miles from Bona! By this
+  time it was too late to begin paying out to-day, and we must lie here
+  moored in a thousand fathoms till light to-morrow morning. The ship
+  pitches a good deal, but the wind is going down.
+
+
+    "_June 13, Sunday._
+
+  "The wind has not gone down however. It now (at 10.30) blows a pretty
+  stiff gale, the sea has also risen; and the _Elba's_ bows rise and
+  fall about 9 feet. We make twelve pitches to the minute, and the poor
+  cable must feel very sea-sick by this time. We are quite unable to do
+  anything, and continue riding at anchor in one thousand fathoms, the
+  engines going constantly so as to keep the ship's bows up to the
+  cable, which by this means hangs nearly vertical and sustains no
+  strain but that caused by its own weight and the pitching of the
+  vessel. We were all up at four, but the weather entirely forbade work
+  for to-day, so some went to bed and most lay down, making up our
+  leeway, as we nautically term our loss of sleep. I must say Liddell is
+  a fine fellow and keeps his patience and temper wonderfully; and yet
+  how he does fret and fume about trifles at home! This wind has blown
+  now for thirty-six hours, and yet we have telegrams from Bona to say
+  the sea there is as calm as a mirror. It makes one laugh to remember
+  one is still tied to the shore. Click, click, click, the pecker is at
+  work; I wonder what Herr P---- says to Herr L----; tests, tests,
+  tests, nothing more. This will be a very anxious day.
+
+
+    "_June 14._
+
+  "Another day of fatal inaction.
+
+
+    "_June 15._
+
+  "9.30.--The wind has gone down a deal; but even now there are doubts
+  whether we shall start to-day. When shall I get back to you?
+
+  "9 P.M.--Four miles from land. Our run has been successful and
+  eventless. Now the work is nearly over I feel a little out of
+  spirits--why, I should be puzzled to say--mere wantonness, or reaction
+  perhaps after suspense.
+
+
+    "_June 16._
+
+  "Up this morning at three, coupled my self-acting gear to the break,
+  and had the satisfaction of seeing it pay out the last four miles in
+  very good style. With one or two little improvements, I hope to make
+  it a capital thing. The end has just gone ashore in two boats, three
+  out of four wires good. Thus ends our first expedition. By some odd
+  chance a _Times_ of June the 7th has found its way on board through
+  the agency of a wretched old peasant who watches the end of the line
+  here. A long account of breakages in the Atlantic trial trip. To-night
+  we grapple for the heavy cable, eight tons to the mile. I long to
+  have a tug at him; he may puzzle me, and though misfortunes or rather
+  difficulties are a bore at the time, life when working with cables is
+  tame without them.
+
+  "2 P.M.--Hurrah, he is hooked, the big fellow, almost at the first
+  cast. He hangs under our bows, looking so huge and imposing that I
+  could find it in my heart to be afraid of him.
+
+
+    "_June 17._
+
+  "We went to a little bay called Chia, where a fresh-water stream falls
+  into the sea, and took in water. This is rather a long operation, so I
+  went a walk up the valley with Mr. Liddell. The coast here consists of
+  rocky mountains 800 to 1,000 feet high, covered with shrubs of a
+  brilliant green. On landing, our first amusement was watching the
+  hundreds of large fish who lazily swam in shoals about the river; the
+  big canes on the further side hold numberless tortoises, we are told,
+  but see none, for just now they prefer taking a siesta. A little
+  further on, and what is this with large pink flowers in such
+  abundance?--the oleander in full flower. At first I fear to pluck
+  them, thinking they must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the
+  banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink
+  and green. Set these in a little valley, framed by mountains whose
+  rocks gleam out blue and purple colours such as pre-Raphaelites only
+  dare attempt, shining out hard and weirdlike amongst the clumps of
+  castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor vitae, and many other evergreens,
+  whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all
+  deep or brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse on the baked
+  deposit at the foot of these large crags. One or two half-savage
+  herdsmen in sheepskin kilts, etc., ask for cigars; partridges whirr up
+  on either side of us; pigeons coo and nightingales sing amongst the
+  blooming oleander. We get six sheep, and many fowls too, from the
+  priest of the small village; and then run back to Spartivento and make
+  preparations for the morning.
+
+
+    "_June 18._
+
+  "The big cable is stubborn, and will not behave like his smaller
+  brother. The gear employed to take him off the drum is not strong
+  enough; he gets slack on the drum and plays the mischief. Luckily for
+  my own conscience, the gear I had wanted was negatived by Mr. Newall.
+  Mr. Liddell does not exactly blame me, but he says we might have had a
+  silver pulley cheaper than the cost of this delay. He has telegraphed
+  for more men to Cagliari, to try to pull the cable off the drum into
+  the hold, by hand. I look as comfortable as I can, but feel as if
+  people were blaming me. I am trying my best to get something rigged
+  which may help us; I wanted a little difficulty, and feel much
+  better.--The short length we have picked up was covered at places with
+  beautiful sprays of coral, twisted and twined with shells of those
+  small, fairy animals we saw in the aquarium at home; poor little
+  things, they died at once, with their little bells and delicate bright
+  tints.
+
+  "_12 o'clock._--Hurrah, victory! for the present anyhow. Whilst in our
+  first dejection, I thought I saw a place where a flat roller would
+  remedy the whole misfortune; but a flat roller at Cape Spartivento,
+  hard, easily unshipped, running freely! There was a grooved pulley
+  used for the paying-out machinery with a spindle wheel, which might
+  suit me. I filled him up with tarry spunyarn, nailed sheet copper
+  round him, bent some parts in the fire; and we are paying-in without
+  more trouble now. You would think some one would praise me; no--no
+  more praise than blame before; perhaps now they think better of me,
+  though.
+
+  "10 P.M.--We have gone on very comfortably for nearly six miles. An
+  hour and a half was spent washing down; for along with many coloured
+  polypi, from corals, shells, and insects, the big cable brings up much
+  mud and rust, and makes a fishy smell by no means pleasant: the bottom
+  seems to teem with life.--But now we are startled by a most
+  unpleasant, grinding noise; which appeared at first to come from the
+  large low pulley, but when the engines stopped, the noise continued;
+  and we now imagine it is something slipping down the cable, and the
+  pulley but acts as sounding-board to the big fiddle. Whether it is
+  only an anchor or one of the two other cables, we know not. We hope it
+  is not the cable just laid down.
+
+
+    "_June 19._
+
+  "10 A.M.--All our alarm groundless, it would appear: the odd noise
+  ceased after a time, and there was no mark sufficiently strong on the
+  large cable to warrant the suspicion that we had cut another line
+  through. I stopped up on the look-out till three in the morning, which
+  made 23 hours between sleep and sleep. One goes dozing about, though,
+  most of the day, for it is only when something goes wrong that one has
+  to look alive. Hour after hour I stand on the forecastle-head, picking
+  off little specimens of polypi and coral, or lie on the saloon deck
+  reading back numbers of the _Times_--till something hitches, and then
+  all is hurly-burly once more. There are awnings all along the ship,
+  and a most ancient, fish-like smell beneath.
+
+  "_1 o'clock._--Suddenly a great strain in only 95 fathoms of
+  water--belts surging and general dismay; grapnels being thrown out in
+  the hope of finding what holds the cable.--Should it prove the young
+  cable! We are apparently crossing its path--not the working one, but
+  the lost child; Mr. Liddell _would_ start the big one first, though it
+  was laid first: he wanted to see the job done, and meant to leave us
+  to the small one unaided by his presence.
+
+  "3.30.--Grapnel caught something, lost it again; it left its marks on
+  the prongs. Started lifting gear again; and after hauling in some 50
+  fathoms--grunt, grunt, grunt--we hear the other cable slipping down
+  our big one, playing the self-same tune we heard last night--louder,
+  however.
+
+  "10 P.M.--The pull on the deck engines became harder and harder. I got
+  steam up in a boiler on deck, and another little engine starts hauling
+  at the grapnel. I wonder if there ever was such a scene of confusion;
+  Mr. Liddell and W---- and the captain all giving orders contradictory,
+  etc., on the forecastle; D----, the foreman of our men, the mates,
+  etc., following the example of our superiors; the ship's engine and
+  boilers below, a 50-horse engine on deck, a boiler 14 feet long on
+  deck beside it, a little steam-winch tearing round; a dozen Italians
+  (20 have come to relieve our hands, the men we telegraphed for to
+  Cagliari) hauling at the rope; wire-men, sailors, in the crevices left
+  by ropes and machinery; everything that could swear swearing--I found
+  myself swearing like a trooper at last. We got the unknown difficulty
+  within ten fathoms of the surface; but then the forecastle got
+  frightened that, if it was the small cable which we had got hold of,
+  we should certainly break it by continuing the tremendous and
+  increasing strain. So at last Mr. Liddell decided to stop; cut the big
+  cable, buoying its end; go back to our pleasant watering-place at
+  Chia, take more water and start lifting the small cable. The end of
+  the large one has even now regained its sandy bed; and three
+  buoys--one to grapnel foul of the supposed small cable, two to the big
+  cable--are dipping about on the surface. One more--a flag-buoy--will
+  soon follow, and then straight for shore.
+
+
+    "_June 20._
+
+  "It is an ill-wind, etc. I have an unexpected opportunity of
+  forwarding this engineering letter; for the craft which brought out
+  our Italian sailors must return to Cagliari to-night, as the little
+  cable will take us nearly to Galita, and the Italian skipper could
+  hardly find his way from thence. To-day--Sunday--not much rest. Mr.
+  Liddell is at Spartivento telegraphing. We are at Chia, and shall
+  shortly go to help our boat's crew in getting the small cable on
+  board. We dropped them some time since in order that they might dig it
+  out of the sand as far as possible.
+
+
+    "_June 21._
+
+  "Yesterday--Sunday as it was--all hands were kept at work all day,
+  coaling, watering, and making a futile attempt to pull the cable from
+  the shore on board through the sand. This attempt was rather silly
+  after the experience we had gained at Cape Spartivento. This morning
+  we grappled, hooked the cable at once, and have made an excellent
+  start. Though I have called this the small cable, it is much larger
+  than the Bona one.--Here comes a break-down, and a bad one.
+
+
+    "_June 22._
+
+  "We got over it however; but it is a warning to me that my future
+  difficulties will arise from parts wearing out. Yesterday the cable
+  was often a lovely sight, coming out of the water one large
+  incrustation of delicate, net-like corals and long white curling
+  shells. No portion of the dirty black wires was visible; instead we
+  had a garland of soft pink with little scarlet sprays and white enamel
+  intermixed. All was fragile, however, and could hardly be secured in
+  safety; and inexorable iron crushed the tender leaves to atoms.--This
+  morning at the end of my watch, about 4 o'clock, we came to the buoys,
+  proving our anticipations right concerning the crossing of the cables.
+  I went to bed for four hours, and on getting up, found a sad mess. A
+  tangle of the six-wire cable hung to the grapnel, which had been left
+  buoyed, and the small cable had parted and is lost for the present.
+  Our hauling of the other day must have done the mischief.
+
+
+    "_June 23._
+
+  "We contrived to get the two ends of the large cable and to pick the
+  short end up. The long end, leading us seaward, was next put round the
+  drum, and a mile of it picked up; but then, fearing another tangle,
+  the end was cut and buoyed, and we returned to grapple for the
+  three-wire cable. All this is very tiresome for me. The buoying and
+  dredging are managed entirely by W----, who has had much experience in
+  this sort of thing; so I have not enough to do, and get very homesick.
+  At noon the wind freshened and the sea rose so high that we had to run
+  for land, and are once more this evening anchored at Chia.
+
+
+    "_June 24._
+
+  "The whole day spent in dredging without success. This operation
+  consists in allowing the ship to drift slowly across the line where
+  you expect the cable to be, while at the end of a long rope, fast
+  either to the bow or stern, a grapnel drags along the ground. This
+  grapnel is a small anchor, made like four pot-hooks tied back to back.
+  When the rope gets taut, the ship is stopped and the grapnel hauled up
+  to the surface in the hopes of finding the cable on its prongs.--I am
+  much discontented with myself for idly lounging about and reading
+  'Westward Ho!' for the second time, instead of taking to electricity
+  or picking up nautical information. I am uncommonly idle. The sea is
+  not quite so rough, but the weather is squally and the rain comes in
+  frequent gusts.
+
+
+    "_June 25._
+
+  "To-day about 1 o'clock we hooked the three-wire cable, buoyed the
+  long sea end, and picked up the short [or shore] end. Now it is dark,
+  and we must wait for morning before lifting the buoy we lowered to-day
+  and proceeding seawards.--The depth of water here is about 600 feet,
+  the height of a respectable English hill; our fishing line was about a
+  quarter of a mile long. It blows pretty fresh, and there is a great
+  deal of sea.
+
+
+    "_26th._
+
+  "This morning it came on to blow so heavily that it was impossible to
+  take up our buoy. The _Elba_ recommenced rolling in true Baltic style,
+  and towards noon we ran for land.
+
+
+    "_27th, Sunday._
+
+  "This morning was a beautiful calm. We reached the buoys at about 4.30
+  and commenced picking up at 6.30. Shortly a new cause of anxiety
+  arose. Kinks came up in great quantities, about thirty in the hour. To
+  have a true conception of a kink, you must see one; it is a loop drawn
+  tight, all the wires get twisted and the gutta-percha inside pushed
+  out. These much diminish the value of the cable, as they must all be
+  cut out, the gutta-percha made good, and the cable spliced. They arise
+  from the cable having been badly laid down, so that it forms folds and
+  tails at the bottom of the sea. These kinks have another disadvantage:
+  they weaken the cable very much.--At about six o'clock [P.M.] we had
+  some twelve miles lifted, when I went to the bows; the kinks were
+  exceedingly tight and were giving way in a most alarming manner. I got
+  a cage rigged up to prevent the end (if it broke) from hurting any
+  one, and sat down on the bowsprit, thinking I should describe kinks to
+  Annie:--suddenly I saw a great many coils and kinks altogether at the
+  surface. I jumped to the gutta-percha pipe, by blowing through which
+  the signal is given to stop the engine. I blow, but the engine does
+  not stop: again--no answer; the coils and kinks jam in the bows and I
+  rush aft shouting Stop! Too late: the cable had parted and must lie in
+  peace at the bottom. Some one had pulled the gutta-percha tube across
+  a bare part of the steam pipe and melted it. It had been used hundreds
+  of times in the last few days and gave no symptoms of failing. I
+  believe the cable must have gone at any rate; however, since it went
+  in my watch, and since I might have secured the tubing more strongly,
+  I feel rather sad....
+
+
+    "_June 28._
+
+  "Since I could not go to Annie I took down Shakespeare, and by the
+  time I had finished _Antony and Cleopatra_, read the second half of
+  _Troilus_ and got some way in _Coriolanus_, I felt it was childish to
+  regret the accident had happened in my watch, and moreover I felt
+  myself not much to blame in the tubing matter--it had been torn down,
+  it had not fallen down; so I went to bed, and slept without fretting,
+  and woke this morning in the same good mood--for which thank you and
+  our friend Shakespeare. I am happy to say Mr. Liddell said the loss of
+  the cable did not much matter; though this would have been no
+  consolation had I felt myself to blame.--This morning we have grappled
+  for and found another length of small cable which Mr. ---- dropped in
+  100 fathoms of water. If this also gets full of kinks, we shall
+  probably have to cut it after 10 miles or so, or, more probably still,
+  it will part of its own free will or weight.
+
+  "10 P.M.--This second length of three-wire cable soon got into the
+  same condition as its fellow--_i.e._ came up twenty kinks an hour--and
+  after seven miles were in, parted on the pulley over the bows at one
+  of the said kinks: during my watch again, but this time no earthly
+  power could have saved it. I had taken all manner of precautions to
+  prevent the end doing any damage when the smash came, for come I knew
+  it must. We now return to the six-wire cable. As I sat watching the
+  cable to-night, large phosphorescent globes kept rolling from it and
+  fading in the black water.
+
+
+    "_29th._
+
+  "To-day we returned to the buoy we had left at the end of the six-wire
+  cable, and after much trouble from a series of tangles, got a fair
+  start at noon. You will easily believe a tangle of iron rope inch and
+  a half diameter is not easy to unravel, especially with a ton or so
+  hanging to the ends. It is now eight o'clock, and we have about six
+  and a half miles safe: it becomes very exciting, however, for the
+  kinks are coming fast and furious.
+
+
+    "_July 2._
+
+  "Twenty-eight miles safe in the hold. The ship is now so deep that the
+  men are to be turned out of their aft hold, and the remainder coiled
+  there; so the good _Elba's_ nose need not burrow too far into the
+  waves. There can only be about 10 or 12 miles more, but these weigh 80
+  or 100 tons.
+
+
+    "_July 5._
+
+  "Our first mate was much hurt in securing a buoy on the evening of the
+  2nd. As interpreter [with the Italians] I am useful in all these
+  cases; but for no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes
+  continually. Pain is a terrible thing.--Our work is done: the whole of
+  the six-wire cable has been recovered; only a small part of the
+  three-wire, but that wire was bad and, owing to its twisted state, the
+  value small. We may therefore be said to have been very successful."
+
+
+  II
+
+I have given this cruise nearly in full. From the notes, unhappily
+imperfect, of two others, I will take only specimens; for in all there
+are features of similarity, and it is possible to have too much even of
+submarine telegraphy and the romance of engineering. And first from the
+cruise of 1859 in the Greek Islands and to Alexandria, take a few
+traits, incidents, and pictures.
+
+
+    "_May 10, 1859._
+
+  "We had a fair wind, and we did very well, seeing a little bit of
+  Cerigo or Cythera, and lots of turtle-doves wandering about over the
+  sea and perching, tired and timid, in the rigging of our little craft.
+  Then Falconera, Antimilo and Milo, topped with huge white clouds,
+  barren, deserted, rising bold and mysterious from the blue chafing
+  sea;--Argentiera, Siphano, Scapho, Paros, Antiparos, and late at night
+  Syra itself. 'Adam Bede' in one hand, a sketch-book in the other,
+  lying on rugs under an awning, I enjoyed a very pleasant day.
+
+
+    "_May 14._
+
+  "Syra is semi-Eastern. The pavement, huge shapeless blocks sloping to
+  a central gutter; from this bare two-storied houses, sometimes plaster
+  many-coloured, sometimes rough-hewn marble, rise, dirty and
+  ill-finished, to straight, plain, flat roofs; shops guiltless of
+  windows, with signs in Greek letters; dogs, Greeks in blue, baggy,
+  Zouave breeches and a fez, a few narghilehs and a sprinkling of the
+  ordinary continental shopboys.--In the evening I tried one more walk
+  in Syra with A----, but in vain endeavoured to amuse myself or to
+  spend money; the first effort resulting in singing 'Doodah' to a
+  passing Greek or two, the second in spending, no, in making A----
+  spend, threepence on coffee for three.
+
+
+    "_May 16._
+
+  "On coming on deck, I found we were at anchor in Canea bay, and saw
+  one of the most lovely sights man could witness. Far on either hand
+  stretch bold mountain capes, Spada and Maleka, tender in colour, bold
+  in outline; rich sunny levels lie beneath them, framed by the azure
+  sea. Right in front, a dark brown fortress girdles white mosques and
+  minarets. Rich and green, our mountain capes here join to form a
+  setting for the town, in whose dark walls--still darker--open a dozen
+  high-arched caves in which the huge Venetian galleys used to lie in
+  wait. High above all, higher and higher yet, up into the firmament,
+  range after range of blue and snow-capped mountains. I was bewildered
+  and amazed, having heard nothing of this great beauty. The town when
+  entered is quite Eastern. The streets are formed of open stalls under
+  the first story, in which squat tailors, cooks, sherbet-vendors and
+  the like, busy at their work or smoking narghilehs. Cloths stretched
+  from house to house keep out the sun. Mules rattle through the crowd;
+  curs yelp between your legs; negroes are as hideous and bright clothed
+  as usual; grave Turks with long chibouques continue to march solemnly
+  without breaking them; a little Arab in one dirty rag pokes fun at two
+  splendid little Turks with brilliant fezzes; wiry mountaineers in
+  dirty, full, white kilts, shouldering long guns and one hand on their
+  pistols, stalk untamed past a dozen Turkish soldiers, who look
+  sheepish and brutal in worn cloth jacket and cotton trousers. A
+  headless, wingless lion of St. Mark still stands upon a gate, and has
+  left the mark of his strong clutch. Of ancient times when Crete was
+  Crete not a trace remains; save perhaps in the full, well-cut nostril
+  and firm tread of that mountaineer, and I suspect that even his sires
+  were Albanians, mere outer barbarians.
+
+
+    "_May 17._
+
+  "I spent the day at the little station where the cable was landed,
+  which has apparently been first a Venetian monastery and then a
+  Turkish mosque. At any rate the big dome is very cool, and the little
+  ones hold [our electric] batteries capitally. A handsome young
+  Bashi-bazouk guards it, and a still handsomer mountaineer is the
+  servant; so I draw them and the monastery and the hill, till I'm black
+  in the face with heat, and come on board to hear the Canea cable is
+  still bad.
+
+
+    "_May 23._
+
+  "We arrived in the morning at the east end of Candia, and had a
+  glorious scramble over the mountains, which seem built of adamant.
+  Time has worn away the softer portions of the rock, only leaving sharp
+  jagged edges of steel. Sea-eagles soaring above our heads; old tanks,
+  ruins and desolation at our feet. The ancient Arsinoe stood here; a
+  few blocks of marble with the cross attest the presence of Venetian
+  Christians; but now--the desolation of desolations. Mr. Liddell and I
+  separated from the rest, and when we had found a sure bay for the
+  cable, had a tremendous lively scramble back to the boat. These are
+  the bits of our life which I enjoy, which have some poetry, some
+  grandeur in them.
+
+
+    "_May 29_ (?).
+
+  "Yesterday we ran round to the new harbour [of Alexandria], landed the
+  shore-end of the cable close to Cleopatra's bath, and made a very
+  satisfactory start about one in the afternoon. We had scarcely gone
+  200 yards when I noticed that the cable ceased to run out, and I
+  wondered why the ship had stopped. People ran aft to tell me not to
+  put such a strain on the cable; I answered indignantly that there was
+  no strain; and suddenly it broke on every one in the ship at once that
+  we were aground. Here was a nice mess. A violent scirocco blew from
+  the land; making one's skin feel as if it belonged to some one else
+  and didn't fit, making the horizon dim and yellow with fine sand,
+  oppressing every sense and raising the thermometer 20 degrees in an
+  hour, but making calm water round us, which enabled the ship to lie
+  for the time in safety. The wind might change at any moment, since the
+  scirocco was only accidental; and at the first wave from seaward bump
+  would go the poor ship, and there would [might] be an end of our
+  voyage. The captain, without waiting to sound, began to make an effort
+  to put the ship over what was supposed to be a sandbank; but by the
+  time soundings were made this was found to be impossible, and he had
+  only been jamming the poor _Elba_ faster on a rock. Now every effort
+  was made to get her astern, an anchor taken out, a rope brought to a
+  winch I had for the cable, and the engines backed; but all in vain. A
+  small Turkish Government steamer, which is to be our consort, came to
+  our assistance, but of course very slowly, and much time was occupied
+  before we could get a hawser to her. I could do no good after having
+  made a chart of the soundings round the ship, and went at last on to
+  the bridge to sketch the scene. But at that moment the strain from the
+  winch and a jerk from the Turkish steamer got off the boat, after we
+  had been some hours aground. The carpenter reported that she had made
+  only two inches of water in one compartment; the cable was still
+  uninjured astern, and our spirits rose; when--will you believe
+  it?--after going a short distance astern, the pilot ran us once more
+  fast aground on what seemed to me nearly the same spot. The very same
+  scene was gone through as on the first occasion, and dark came on
+  whilst the wind shifted, and we were still aground. Dinner was served
+  up, but poor Mr. Liddell could eat very little; and bump, bump, grind,
+  grind, went the ship fifteen or sixteen times as we sat at dinner. The
+  slight sea, however, did enable us to bump off. This morning we appear
+  not to have suffered in any way; but a sea is rolling in, which a few
+  hours ago would have settled the poor old _Elba_.
+
+
+    "_June --._
+
+  "The Alexandria cable has again failed; after paying out two-thirds of
+  the distance successfully, an unlucky touch in deep water snapped the
+  line. Luckily the accident occurred in Mr. Liddell's watch. Though
+  personally it may not really concern me, the accident weighs like a
+  personal misfortune. Still, I am glad I was present: a failure is
+  probably more instructive than a success; and this experience may
+  enable us to avoid misfortune in still greater undertakings.
+
+
+    "_June --._
+
+  "We left Syra the morning after our arrival on Saturday the 4th. This
+  we did (first) because we were in a hurry to do something, and
+  (second) because, coming from Alexandria, we had four days' quarantine
+  to perform. We were all mustered along the side while the doctor
+  counted us; the letters were popped into a little tin box and taken
+  away to be smoked; the guardians put on board to see that we held no
+  communication with the shore--without them we should still have had
+  four more days' quarantine; and with twelve Greek sailors besides, we
+  started merrily enough picking up the Canea cable.... To our utter
+  dismay, the yarn covering began to come up quite decayed, and the
+  cable, which when laid should have borne half a ton, was now in danger
+  of snapping with a tenth part of that strain. We went as slow as
+  possible in fear of a break at every instant. My watch was from eight
+  to twelve in the morning, and during that time we had barely secured
+  three miles of cable. Once it broke inside the ship, but I seized hold
+  of it in time--the weight being hardly anything--and the line for the
+  nonce was saved. Regular nooses were then planted inboard with men to
+  draw them taut, should the cable break inboard. A----, who should have
+  relieved me, was unwell, so I had to continue my look-out; and about
+  one o'clock the line again parted, but was again caught in the last
+  noose, with about four inches to spare. Five minutes afterwards it
+  again parted, and was yet once more caught. Mr. Liddell (whom I had
+  called) could stand this no longer; so we buoyed the line and ran into
+  a bay in Siphano, waiting for calm weather, though I was by no means
+  of opinion that the slight sea and wind had been the cause of our
+  failures.--All next day (Monday) we lay off Siphano, amusing ourselves
+  on shore with fowling-pieces and navy revolvers. I need not say we
+  killed nothing; and luckily we did not wound any of ourselves. A
+  guardiano accompanied us, his functions being limited to preventing
+  actual contact with the natives, for they might come as near, and talk
+  as much as they pleased. These isles of Greece are sad, interesting
+  places. They are not really barren all over, but they are quite
+  destitute of verdure; and tufts of thyme, wild mastic or mint, though
+  they sound well, are not nearly so pretty as grass. Many little
+  churches, glittering white, dot the islands; most of them, I believe,
+  abandoned during the whole year, with the exception of one day sacred
+  to their patron saint. The villages are mean, but the inhabitants do
+  not look wretched, and the men are good sailors. There is something in
+  this Greek race yet; they will become a powerful Levantine nation in
+  the course of time.--What a lovely moonlight evening that was! the
+  barren island cutting the clear sky with fantastic outline, marble
+  cliffs on either hand fairly gleaming over the calm sea. Next day, the
+  wind still continuing, I proposed a boating excursion, and decoyed
+  A----, L----, and S---- into accompanying me. We took the little gig,
+  and sailed away merrily enough round a point to a beautiful white bay,
+  flanked with two glistening little churches, fronted by beautiful
+  distant islands; when suddenly, to my horror, I discovered the _Elba_
+  steaming full speed out from the island. Of course we steered after
+  her; but the wind that instant ceased, and we were left in a dead
+  calm. There was nothing for it but to unship the mast, get out the
+  oars and pull. The ship was nearly certain to stop at the buoy; and I
+  wanted to learn how to take an oar, so here was a chance with a
+  vengeance! L---- steered, and we three pulled--a broiling pull it was
+  about half way across to Palikandro; still we did come in, pulling an
+  uncommon good stroke, and I had learned to hang on my oar. L---- had
+  pressed me to let him take my place; but though I was very tired at
+  the end of the first quarter of an hour, and then every successive
+  half hour, I would not give in. I nearly paid dear for my obstinacy,
+  however; for in the evening I had alternate fits of shivering and
+  burning."
+
+
+  III
+
+The next extracts, and I am sorry to say the last, are from Fleeming's
+letters of 1860, when he was back at Bona and Spartivento, and for the
+first time at the head of an expedition. Unhappily these letters are
+not only the last, but the series is quite imperfect; and this is the
+more to be lamented as he had now begun to use a pen more skilfully, and
+in the following notes there is at times a touch of real distinction in
+the manner.
+
+
+    "_Cagliari, October 5, 1860._
+
+  "All Tuesday I spent examining what was on board the _Elba_, and
+  trying to start the repairs of the Spartivento land line, which has
+  been entirely neglected--and no wonder, for no one has been paid for
+  three months, no, not even the poor guards who have to keep
+  themselves, their horses and their families, on their pay. Wednesday
+  morning, I started for Spartivento, and got there in time to try a
+  good many experiments. Spartivento looks more wild and savage than
+  ever, but is not without a strange deadly beauty: the hills covered
+  with bushes of a metallic green with coppery patches of soil in
+  between; the valleys filled with dry salt mud and a little stagnant
+  water; where that very morning the deer had drunk, where herons,
+  curlews, and other fowl abound, and where, alas! malaria is breeding
+  with this rain. (No fear for those who do not sleep on shore.) A
+  little iron hut had been placed there since 1858; but the windows had
+  been carried off, the door broken down, the roof pierced all over. In
+  it we sat to make experiments; and how it recalled Birkenhead! There
+  was Thomson, there was my testing-board, the strings of gutta-percha;
+  Harry P---- even battering with the batteries; but where was my
+  darling Annie? Whilst I sat, feet in sand, with Harry alone inside the
+  hut--mats, coats, and wood to darken the window--the others visited
+  the murderous old friar, who is of the order of Scaloppi, and for whom
+  I brought a letter from his superior, ordering him to pay us
+  attention; but he was away from home, gone to Cagliari in a boat with
+  the produce of the farm belonging to his convent. Then they visited
+  the tower of Chia, but could not get in because the door is thirty
+  feet off the ground; so they came back and pitched a magnificent tent
+  which I brought from the _Bahiana_ a long time ago--and where they
+  will live (if I mistake not) in preference to the friar's or the owl-
+  and bat-haunted tower. MM. T---- and S---- will be left there: T---- an
+  intelligent, hard-working Frenchman with whom I am well pleased; he
+  can speak English and Italian well, and has been two years at Genoa.
+  S---- is a French German with a face like an ancient Gaul, who has
+  been sergeant-major in the French line, and who is, I see, a great,
+  big, muscular _faineant_. We left the tent pitched and some stores in
+  charge of a guide, and ran back to Cagliari.
+
+  "Certainly being at the head of things is pleasanter than being
+  subordinate. We all agree very well; and I have made the testing
+  office into a kind of private room, where I can come and write to you
+  undisturbed, surrounded by my dear, bright brass things which all of
+  them remind me of our nights at Birkenhead. Then I can work here too,
+  and try lots of experiments; you know how I like that! and now and
+  then I read--Shakespeare principally. Thank you so much for making me
+  bring him: I think I must get a pocket edition of _Hamlet_ and _Henry
+  the Fifth_, so as never to be without them.
+
+
+    "_Cagliari, October 7._
+
+  "[The town was full?] ... of red-shirted English Garibaldini. A very
+  fine-looking set of fellows they are too: the officers rather raffish,
+  but with medals, Crimean and Indian; the men a very sturdy set, with
+  many lads of good birth I should say. They still wait their consort
+  the _Emperor_, and will, I fear, be too late to do anything. I meant
+  to have called on them, but they are all gone into barracks some way
+  from the town, and I have been much too busy to go far.
+
+  "The view from the ramparts was very strange and beautiful. Cagliari
+  rises on a very steep rock, at the mouth of a wide plain circled by
+  large hills and three-quarters filled with lagoons; it looks,
+  therefore, like an old island citadel. Large heaps of salt mark the
+  border between the sea and the lagoons; thousands of flamingoes whiten
+  the centre of the huge shallow marsh; hawks hover and scream among the
+  trees under the high mouldering battlements.--A little lower down, the
+  band played. Men and ladies bowed and pranced, the costumes posed,
+  church bells tinkled, processions processed, the sun set behind thick
+  clouds capping the hills; I pondered on you and enjoyed it all.
+
+  "Decidedly I prefer being master to being man: boats at all hours,
+  stewards flying for marmalade, captain inquiring when ship is to sail,
+  clerks to copy my writing, the boat to steer when we go out--I have
+  run her nose on several times; decidedly, I begin to feel quite a
+  little king. Confound the cable, though! I shall never be able to
+  repair it.
+
+
+    "_Bona, October 14._
+
+  "We left Cagliari at 4.30 on the 9th, and soon got to Spartivento. I
+  repeated some of my experiments, but found Thomson, who was to have
+  been my grand stand-by, would not work on that day in the wretched
+  little hut. Even if the windows and door had been put in, the wind,
+  which was very high, made the lamp flicker about and blew it out; so I
+  sent on board and got old sails, and fairly wrapped the hut up in
+  them; and then we were as snug as could be, and I left the hut in
+  glorious condition, with a nice little stove in it. The tent which
+  should have been forthcoming from the cure's for the guards had gone
+  to Cagliari; but I found another, [a] green, Turkish tent, in the
+  _Elba_, and soon had him up. The square tent left on the last occasion
+  was standing all right and tight in spite of wind and rain. We landed
+  provisions, two beds, plates, knives, forks, candles, cooking
+  utensils, and were ready for a start at 6 P.M.; but the wind meanwhile
+  had come on to blow at such a rate that I thought better of it, and
+  we stopped. T---- and S---- slept ashore, however, to see how they
+  liked it; at least they tried to sleep, for S----, the ancient
+  sergeant-major, had a toothache, and T---- thought the tent was coming
+  down every minute. Next morning they could only complain of sand and a
+  leaky coffee-pot, so I leave them with a good conscience. The little
+  encampment looked quite picturesque: the green round tent, the square
+  white tent, and the hut all wrapped up in sails, on a sandhill,
+  looking on the sea and masking those confounded marshes at the back.
+  One would have thought the Cagliaritans were in a conspiracy to
+  frighten the two poor fellows, who (I believe) will be safe enough if
+  they do not go into the marshes after nightfall. S---- brought a
+  little dog to amuse them,--such a jolly, ugly little cur without a
+  tail, but full of fun; he will be better than quinine.
+
+  "The wind drove a barque, which had anchored near us for shelter, out
+  to sea. We started, however, at 2 P.M., and had a quick passage, but a
+  very rough one, getting to Bona by daylight [on the 11th]. Such a
+  place as this is for getting anything done! The health boat went away
+  from us at 7.30 with W---- on board; and we heard nothing of them till
+  9.30, when W---- came back with two fat Frenchmen, who are to look on
+  on the part of the Government. They are exactly alike: only one has
+  four bands and the other three round his cap, and so I know them. Then
+  I sent a boat round to Fort Genois [Fort Geneva of 1858], where the
+  cable is landed, with all sorts of things and directions, whilst I
+  went ashore to see about coals and a room at the fort. We hunted
+  people in the little square, in their shops and offices, but only
+  found them in cafes. One amiable gentleman wasn't up at 9.30, was out
+  at 10, and as soon as he came back the servant said he would go to bed
+  and not get up till 3: he came however to find us at a cafe, and said
+  that, on the contrary, two days in the week he did not do so! Then my
+  two fat friends must have their breakfast after their 'something' at a
+  cafe; and all the shops shut from 10 to 2; and the post does not open
+  till 12; and there was a road to Fort Genois, only a bridge had been
+  carried away, etc. At last I got off, and we rowed round to Fort
+  Genois, where my men had put up a capital gipsy tent with sails, and
+  there was my big board and Thomson's number 5 in great glory. I soon
+  came to the conclusion there was a break. Two of my faithful
+  Cagliaritans slept all night in the little tent, to guard it and my
+  precious instruments; and the sea, which was rather rough, silenced my
+  Frenchmen.
+
+  "Next day I went on with my experiments, whilst a boat grappled for
+  the cable a little way from shore, and buoyed it where the _Elba_
+  could get hold. I brought all back to the _Elba_, tried my machinery,
+  and was all ready for a start next morning. But the wretched coal had
+  not come yet; Government permission from Algiers to be got; lighters,
+  men, baskets, and I know not what forms to be got or got through--and
+  everybody asleep! Coals or no coals, I was determined to start next
+  morning; and start we did at four in the morning, picked up the buoy
+  with our deck-engine, popped the cable across a boat, tested the wires
+  to make sure the fault was not behind us, and started picking up at
+  11. Everything worked admirably, and about 2 P.M. in came the fault.
+  There is no doubt the cable was broken by coral-fishers; twice they
+  have had it up to their own knowledge.
+
+  "Many men have been ashore to-day and have come back tipsy, and the
+  whole ship is in a state of quarrel from top to bottom, and they will
+  gossip just within my hearing. And we have had moreover three French
+  gentlemen and a French lady to dinner, and I had to act host and try
+  to manage the mixtures to their taste. The good-natured little
+  Frenchwoman was most amusing; when I asked her if she would have some
+  apple tart--'_Mon Dieu_,' with heroic resignation, '_je veux bien_';
+  or a little _plombodding_--'_Mais ce que vous voudrez, Monsieur!_'
+
+
+    "_SS. Elba, somewhere not far from Bona, Oct. 19._
+
+  "Yesterday [after three previous days of useless grappling] was
+  destined to be very eventful. We began dredging at daybreak, and
+  hooked at once every time in rocks; but by capital luck, just as we
+  were deciding it was no use to continue in that place, we hooked the
+  cable: up it came, was tested, and lo! another complete break, a
+  quarter of a mile off. I was amazed at my own tranquillity under these
+  disappointments, but I was not really half so fussy as about getting a
+  cab. Well, there was nothing for it but grappling again, and, as you
+  may imagine, we were getting about six miles from shore. But the water
+  did not deepen rapidly; we seemed to be on the crest of a kind of
+  submarine mountain in prolongation of Cape de Gonde, and pretty havoc
+  we must have made with the crags. What rocks we did hook! No sooner
+  was the grapnel down than the ship was anchored; and then came such a
+  business: ship's engines going, deck-engine thundering, belt slipping,
+  fear of breaking ropes: actually breaking grapnels. It was always an
+  hour or more before we could get the grapnel down again. At last we
+  had to give up the place, though we knew we were close to the cable,
+  and go farther to sea in much deeper water; to my great fear, as I
+  knew the cable was much eaten away and would stand but little strain.
+  Well, we hooked the cable first dredge this time, and pulled it slowly
+  and gently to the top, with much trepidation. Was it the cable? was
+  there any weight on? it was evidently too small. Imagine my dismay
+  when the cable did come up, but hanging loosely, thus:
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  instead of taut, thus:
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  showing certain signs of a break close by. For a moment I felt
+  provoked, as I thought 'Here we are, in deep water, and the cable will
+  not stand lifting!' I tested at once, and by the very first wire found
+  it had broken towards shore and was good towards sea. This was of
+  course very pleasant: but from that time to this, though the wires
+  test very well, not a signal has come from Spartivento. I got the
+  cable into a boat, and a gutta-percha line from the ship to the boat,
+  and we signalled away at a great rate--but no signs of life. The tests
+  however make me pretty sure one wire at least is good; so I determined
+  to lay down cable from where we were to the shore, and go to
+  Spartivento to see what had happened there. I fear my men are ill. The
+  night was lovely, perfectly calm; so we lay close to the boat and
+  signals were continually sent, but with no result. This morning I had
+  the cable down to Fort Genois in style; and now we are picking up odds
+  and ends of cable between the different breaks, and getting our buoys
+  on board, etc. To-morrow I expect to leave for Spartivento."
+
+
+  IV
+
+And now I am quite at an end of journal-keeping; diaries and diary
+letters being things of youth which Fleeming had at length outgrown. But
+one or two more fragments from his correspondence may be taken, and
+first this brief sketch of the laying of the Norderney cable; mainly
+interesting as showing under what defects of strength and in what
+extremities of pain this cheerful man must at times continue to go about
+his work.
+
+  "I slept on board 29th September, having arranged everything to start
+  by daybreak from where we lay in the roads: but at daybreak a heavy
+  mist hung over us so that nothing of land or water could be seen. At
+  midday it lifted suddenly, and away we went with perfect weather, but
+  could not find the buoys Forde left, that evening. I saw the captain
+  was not strong in navigation, and took matters next day much more into
+  my own hands, and before nine o'clock found the buoys (the weather had
+  been so fine we had anchored in the open sea near Texel). It took us
+  till the evening to reach the buoys, get the cable on board, test the
+  first half, speak to Lowestoft, make the splice, and start. H---- had
+  not finished his work at Norderney, so I was alone on board for
+  Reuter. Moreover the buoys to guide us in our course were not placed,
+  and the captain had very vague ideas about keeping his course; so I
+  had to do a good deal, and only lay down as I was for two hours in the
+  night. I managed to run the course perfectly. Everything went well,
+  and we found Norderney just where we wanted it next afternoon, and if
+  the shore-end had been laid, could have finished there and then,
+  October 1st. But when we got to Norderney, we found the _Caroline_
+  with shore-end lying apparently aground, and could not understand her
+  signals; so we had to anchor suddenly, and I went off in a small boat
+  with the captain to the _Caroline_. It was cold by this time, and my
+  arm was rather stiff, and I was tired; I hauled myself up on board the
+  _Caroline_ by a rope, and found H---- and two men on board. All the
+  rest were trying to get the shore-end on shore, but had failed, and
+  apparently had stuck on shore, and the waves were getting up. We had
+  anchored in the right place, and next morning we hoped the shore-end
+  would be laid, so we had only to go back. It was of course still
+  colder, and quite night. I went to bed and hoped to sleep, but, alas,
+  the rheumatism got into the joints and caused me terrible pain, so
+  that I could not sleep. I bore it as long as I could in order to
+  disturb no one, for all were tired; but at last I could bear it no
+  longer, and I managed to wake the steward, and got a mustard poultice,
+  which took the pain from the shoulder; but then the elbow got very
+  bad, and I had to call the second steward and get a second poultice,
+  and then it was daylight, and I felt very ill and feverish. The sea
+  was now rather rough--too rough rather for small boats, but luckily a
+  sort of thing called a scoot came out, and we got on board her with
+  some trouble, and got on shore after a good tossing about, which made
+  us all sea-sick. The cable sent from the _Caroline_ was just 60 yards
+  too short, and did not reach the shore, so although the _Caroline_ did
+  make the splice late that night, we could neither test nor speak.
+  Reuter was at Norderney, and I had to do the best I could, which was
+  not much, and went to bed early; I thought I should never sleep again,
+  but in sheer desperation got up in the middle of the night and gulped
+  a lot of raw whisky, and slept at last. But not long. A Mr. F----
+  washed my face and hands and dressed me; and we hauled the cable out
+  of the sea, and got it joined to the telegraph station, and on October
+  3rd telegraphed to Lowestoft first, and then to London. Miss Clara
+  Volkman, a niece of Mr. Reuter's, sent the first message to Mrs.
+  Reuter, who was waiting (Varley used Miss Clara's hand as a kind of
+  key), and I sent one of the first messages to Odden. I thought a
+  message addressed to him would not frighten you, and that he would
+  enjoy a message through papa's cable. I hope he did. They were all
+  very merry, but I had been so lowered by pain that I could not enjoy
+  myself in spite of the success."
+
+
+  V
+
+Of the 1869 cruise in the _Great Eastern_ I give what I am able; only
+sorry it is no more, for the sake of the ship itself, already almost a
+legend even to the generation that saw it launched.
+
+  "_June 17, 1869._--Here are the names of our staff, in whom I expect
+  you to be interested, as future _Great Eastern_ stories may be full of
+  them; Theophilus Smith, a man of Latimer Clark's; Leslie C. Hill, my
+  prizeman at University College; Lord Sackville Cecil; King, one of the
+  Thomsonian Kings; Laws, goes for Willoughby Smith, who will also be on
+  board; Varley, Clark, and Sir James Anderson, make up the sum of all
+  you know anything of. A Captain Halpin commands the big ship. There
+  are four smaller vessels. The _Wm. Cory_, which laid the Norderney
+  cable, has already gone to St. Pierre to lay the shore-ends. The
+  _Hawk_ and _Chiltern_ have gone to Brest to lay shore-ends. The _Hawk_
+  and _Scanderia_ go with us across the Atlantic, and we shall at St.
+  Pierre be transhipped into one or the other.
+
+  "_June 18, somewhere in London._--The shore-end is laid, as you may
+  have seen, and we are all under pressing orders to march, so we start
+  from London to-night at 5.10.
+
+  "_June 20, off Ushant._--I am getting quite fond of the big ship.
+  Yesterday morning in the quiet sunlight she turned so slowly and
+  lazily in the great harbour at Portland, and by and by slipped out
+  past the long pier with so little stir, that I could hardly believe we
+  were really off. No men drunk, no women crying, no singing or
+  swearing, no confusion or bustle on deck--nobody apparently aware that
+  they had anything to do. The look of the thing was that the ship had
+  been spoken to civilly, and had kindly undertaken to do everything
+  that was necessary without any further interference. I have a nice
+  cabin, with plenty of room for my legs in my berth, and have slept two
+  nights like a top. Then we have the ladies' cabin set apart as an
+  engineer's office, and I think this decidedly the nicest place in the
+  ship: 35 ft. x 20 ft. broad--four tables, three great mirrors, plenty
+  of air, and no heat from the funnels, which spoil the great
+  dining-room. I saw a whole library of books on the walls when here
+  last, and this made me less anxious to provide light literature; but
+  alas, to-day I find that they are every one Bibles or Prayer-books.
+  Now one cannot read many hundred Bibles.... As for the motion of the
+  ship, it is not very much, but 'twill suffice. Thomson shook hands and
+  wished me well. I _do_ like Thomson.... Tell Austin that the _Great
+  Eastern_ has six masts and four funnels. When I get back I will make a
+  little model of her for all the chicks, and pay out cotton reels....
+  Here we are at 4.20 at Brest. We leave probably to-morrow morning.
+
+  "_July 12, Great Eastern._--Here as I write we run our last course for
+  the buoy at the St. Pierre shore-end. It blows and lightens, and our
+  good ship rolls, and buoys are hard to find; but we must soon now
+  finish our work, and then this letter will start for home....
+  Yesterday we were mournfully groping our way through the wet grey fog,
+  not at all sure where we were, with one consort lost and the other
+  faintly answering the roar of our great whistle through the mist. As
+  to the ship which was to meet us, and pioneer us up the deep channel,
+  we did not know if we should come within twenty miles of her; when
+  suddenly up went the fog, out came the sun, and there, straight
+  ahead, was the _Wm. Cory_, our pioneer, and a little dancing boat, the
+  _Gulnare_, sending signals of welcome with many-coloured flags. Since
+  then we have been steaming in a grand procession; but now at 2 A.M.
+  the fog has fallen, and the great roaring whistle calls up the distant
+  answering notes all around us. Shall we or shall we not find the buoy?
+
+  "_July 13._--All yesterday we lay in the damp dripping fog, with
+  whistles all round and guns firing so that we might not bump up
+  against one another. This little delay has let us get our reports into
+  tolerable order. We are now, at seven o'clock, getting the cable end
+  again, with the main cable buoy close to us."
+
+  _A telegram of July 20._--"I have received your four welcome letters.
+  The Americans are charming people."
+
+
+  VI
+
+And here, to make an end, are a few random bits about the cruise to
+Pernambuco:--
+
+  "_Plymouth, June 21, 1873._--I have been down to the seashore and
+  smelt the salt sea, and like it; and I have seen the _Hooper_ pointing
+  her great bow seaward, while light smoke rises from her funnels,
+  telling that the fires are being lighted; and sorry as I am to be
+  without you, something inside me answers to the call to be off and
+  doing.
+
+  "_Lalla Rookh, Plymouth, June 22._--We have been a little cruise in
+  the yacht over to the Eddystone lighthouse, and my sea-legs seem very
+  well on. Strange how alike all these starts are--first on shore,
+  steaming hot days with a smell of bone-dust and tar and salt water;
+  then the little puffing, panting steam-launch, that bustles out across
+  a port with green woody sides, little yachts sliding about, men-of-war
+  training-ships, and then a great big black hulk of a thing with a mass
+  of smaller vessels sticking to it like parasites; and that is one's
+  home being coaled. Then comes the champagne lunch, where every one
+  says all that is polite to every one else, and then the uncertainty
+  when to start. So far as we know _now_, we are to start to-morrow
+  morning at daybreak; letters that come later are to be sent to
+  Pernambuco by first mail.... My father has sent me the heartiest sort
+  of Jack Tar's cheer.
+
+  "_SS. Hooper, off Funchal, June 29._--Here we are, off Madeira at
+  seven o'clock in the morning. Thomson has been sounding with his
+  special toy ever since half-past three (1087 fathoms of water). I have
+  been watching the day break, and long jagged islands start into being
+  out of the dull night. We are still some miles from land; but the sea
+  is calmer than Loch Eil often was, and the big _Hooper_ rests very
+  contentedly after a pleasant voyage and favourable breezes. I have not
+  been able to do any real work except the testing [of the cable], for,
+  though not sea-sick, I get a little giddy when I try to think on
+  board.... The ducks have just had their daily souse and are quacking
+  and gabbling in a mighty way outside the door of the captain's deck
+  cabin, where I write. The cocks are crowing, and new-laid eggs are
+  said to be found in the coops. Four mild oxen have been untethered and
+  allowed to walk along the broad iron decks--a whole drove of sheep
+  seem quite content while licking big lumps of bay salt. Two
+  exceedingly impertinent goats lead the cook a perfect life of misery.
+  They steal round the galley and _will_ nibble the carrots or turnips
+  if his back is turned for one minute; and then he throws something at
+  them and misses them; and they scuttle off laughing impudently, and
+  flick one ear at him from a safe distance. This is the most impudent
+  gesture I ever saw. Winking is nothing to it. The ear normally hangs
+  down behind; the goat turns sideways to her enemy--by a little knowing
+  cock of the head flicks one ear over one eye, and squints from behind
+  it, for half a minute--tosses her head back, skips a pace or two
+  further off, and repeats the manoeuvre. The cook is very fat, and
+  cannot run after that goat much.
+
+  "_Pernambuco, Aug. 1._--We landed here yesterday, all well and cable
+  sound, after a good passage.... I am on familiar terms with
+  cocoa-nuts, mangoes, and bread-fruit trees, but I think I like the
+  negresses best of anything I have seen. In turbans and loose sea-green
+  robes, with beautiful black-brown complexions and a stately carriage,
+  they really are a satisfaction to my eye. The weather has been windy
+  and rainy; the _Hooper_ has to lie about a mile from the town, in an
+  open roadstead, with the whole swell of the Atlantic driving straight
+  on shore. The little steam-launch gives all who go in her a good
+  ducking, as she bobs about on the big rollers; and my old gymnastic
+  practice stands me in good stead on boarding and leaving her. We
+  clamber down a rope-ladder hanging from the high stern, and then,
+  taking a rope in one hand, swing into the launch at the moment when
+  she can contrive to steam up under us--bobbing about like an apple
+  thrown into a tub all the while. The President of the province and his
+  suite tried to come off to a State luncheon on board on Sunday; but
+  the launch, being rather heavily laden, behaved worse than usual, and
+  some green seas stove in the President's hat and made him wetter than
+  he had probably ever been in his life; so after one or two rollers, he
+  turned back; and indeed he was wise to do so, for I don't see how he
+  could have got on board.... Being fully convinced that the world will
+  not continue to go round unless I pay it personal attention, I must
+  run away to my work."
+
+
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+
+  1869-1885
+
+   Edinburgh--Colleagues--_Farrago vitae_--I. The family circle--Fleeming
+   and his sons--Highland life--The cruise of the steam-launch--Summer
+   in Styria--Rustic manners--II. The drama--Private theatricals--III.
+   Sanitary associations--The phonograph--IV. Fleeming's acquaintance
+   with a student--His late maturity of mind--Religion and morality--His
+   love of heroism--Taste in literature--V. His talk--His late
+   popularity--Letter from M. Trelat.
+
+
+The remaining external incidents of Fleeming's life, pleasures, honours,
+fresh interests, new friends, are not such as will bear to be told at
+any length or in the temporal order. And it is now time to lay narration
+by, and to look at the man he was, and the life he lived, more largely.
+
+Edinburgh, which was thenceforth to be his home, is a metropolitan small
+town; where college professors and the lawyers of the Parliament House
+give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational
+advantages, make up much of the bulk of society. Not, therefore, an
+unlettered place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh will compare favourably
+with much larger cities. A hard and disputatious element has been
+commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself
+regarded, even in this metropolis of disputation, as a thorny
+table-mate. To golf unhappily he did not take, and golf is a cardinal
+virtue in the city of the winds. Nor did he become an archer of the
+Queen's Body Guard, which is the Chiltern Hundreds of the distasted
+golfer. He did not even frequent the Evening Club, where his colleague
+Tait (in my day) was so punctual and so genial. So that in some ways he
+stood outside of the lighter and kindlier life of his new home. I should
+not like to say that he was generally popular; but there, as elsewhere,
+those who knew him well enough to love him, loved him well. And he, upon
+his side, liked a place where a dinner-party was not of necessity
+unintellectual, and where men stood up to him in argument.
+
+The presence of his old classmate, Tait,[26] was one of his early
+attractions to the Chair; and now that Fleeming is gone again, Tait
+still remains, ruling and really teaching his great classes. Sir Robert
+Christison was an old friend of his mother's; Sir Alexander Grant,
+Kelland, and Sellar were new acquaintances, and highly valued; and these
+too, all but the last,[27] have been taken from their friends and
+labours. Death has been busy in the Senatus. I will speak elsewhere of
+Fleeming's demeanour to his students; and it will be enough to add here
+that his relations with his colleagues in general were pleasant to
+himself.
+
+Edinburgh, then, with its society, its University work, its delightful
+scenery and its skating in the winter, was thenceforth his base of
+operations. But he shot meanwhile erratic in many directions: twice to
+America, as we have seen, on telegraph voyages; continually to London on
+business; often to Paris; year after year to the Highlands to shoot, to
+fish, to learn reels and Gaelic, to make the acquaintance and fall in
+love with the character of Highlanders; and once to Styria, to hunt
+chamois and dance with peasant maidens. All the while he was pursuing
+the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking up
+the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation; reading,
+writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations, interested in
+technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting,
+directing private theatricals, going a long way to see an actor--a long
+way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway of contemporary
+interests. And all the while he was busied about his father and mother,
+his wife, and in particular his sons; anxiously watching, anxiously
+guiding these, and plunging with his whole fund of youthfulness into
+their sports and interests. And all the while he was himself
+maturing--not in character or body, for these remained young--but in the
+stocked mind, in the tolerant knowledge of life and man, in pious
+acceptance of the universe. Here is a farrago for a chapter; here is a
+world of interests and activities, human, artistic, social, scientific,
+at each of which he sprang with impetuous pleasure, on each of which he
+squandered energy, the arrow drawn to the head, the whole intensity of
+his spirit bent, for the moment, on the momentary purpose. It was this
+that lent such unusual interest to his society, so that no friend of his
+can forget that figure of Fleeming coming charged with some new
+discovery: it is this that makes his character so difficult to
+represent. Our fathers, upon some difficult theme, would invoke the
+Muse; I can but appeal to the imagination of the reader. When I dwell
+upon some one thing, he must bear in mind it was only one of a score;
+that the unweariable brain was teeming at the very time with other
+thoughts; that the good heart had left no kind duty forgotten.
+
+
+  I
+
+In Edinburgh, for a considerable time, Fleeming's family, to three
+generations, was united: Mr. and Mrs. Austin at Hailes, Captain and Mrs.
+Jenkin in the suburb of Merchiston, Fleeming himself in the city. It is
+not every family that could risk with safety such close inter-domestic
+dealings; but in this also Fleeming was particularly favoured. Even the
+two extremes, Mr. Austin and the Captain, drew together. It is pleasant
+to find that each of the old gentlemen set a high value on the good
+looks of the other, doubtless also on his own; and a fine picture they
+made as they walked the green terrace at Hailes, conversing by the hour.
+What they talked of is still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr.
+Austin always declared that on these occasions he learned much. To both
+of these families of elders due service was paid of attention; to both,
+Fleeming's easy circumstances had brought joy; and the eyes of all were
+on the grandchildren. In Fleeming's scheme of duties, those of the
+family stood first; a man was first of all a child, nor did he cease to
+be so, but only took on added obligations, when he became in turn a
+father. The care of his parents was always a first thought with him, and
+their gratification his delight. And the care of his sons, as it was
+always a grave subject of study with him, and an affair never neglected,
+so it brought him a thousand satisfactions. "Hard work they are," as he
+once wrote, "but what fit work!" And again: "O, it's a cold house where
+a dog is the only representative of a child!" Not that dogs were
+despised; we shall drop across the name of Jack, the harum-scarum Irish
+terrier, ere we have done; his own dog Plato went up with him daily to
+his lectures, and still (like other friends) feels the loss and looks
+visibly for the reappearance of his master; and Martin the cat Fleeming
+has himself immortalised, to the delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the
+columns of the _Spectator_. Indeed, there was nothing in which men take
+interest, in which he took not some; and yet always most in the strong
+human bonds, ancient as the race and woven of delights and duties.
+
+He was even an anxious father; perhaps that is the part where optimism
+is hardest tested. He was eager for his sons; eager for their health,
+whether of mind or body; eager for their education; in that, I should
+have thought, too eager. But he kept a pleasant face upon all things,
+believed in play, loved it himself, shared boyishly in theirs, and knew
+how to put a face of entertainment upon business and a spirit of
+education into entertainment. If he was to test the progress of the
+three boys, this advertisement would appear in their little manuscript
+paper:--"Notice: The Professor of Engineering in the University of
+Edinburgh intends at the close of the scholastic year to hold
+examinations in the following subjects: (1) For boys in the fourth class
+of the Academy--Geometry and Algebra; (2) For boys at Mr. Henderson's
+school--Dictation and Recitation; (3) For boys taught exclusively by
+their mothers--Arithmetic and Reading." Prizes were given; but what
+prize would be so conciliatory as this boyish little joke? It may read
+thin here; it would smack racily in the playroom. Whenever his sons
+"started a new fad" (as one of them writes to me) they "had only to tell
+him about it, and he was at once interested, and keen to help." He would
+discourage them in nothing unless it was hopelessly too hard for them;
+only, if there was any principle of science involved, they must
+understand the principle; and whatever was attempted, that was to be
+done thoroughly. If it was but play, if it was but a puppet-show they
+were to build, he set them the example of being no sluggard in play.
+When Frewen, the second son, embarked on the ambitious design to make an
+engine for a toy steamboat, Fleeming made him begin with a proper
+drawing--doubtless to the disgust of the young engineer; but once that
+foundation laid, helped in the work with unflagging gusto, "tinkering
+away," for hours, and assisted at the final trial "in the big bath" with
+no less excitement than the boy. "He would take any amount of trouble to
+help us," writes my correspondent. "We never felt an affair was complete
+till we had called him to see, and he would come at any time, in the
+middle of any work." There was indeed one recognised play-hour,
+immediately after the despatch of the day's letters; and the boys were
+to be seen waiting on the stairs until the mail should be ready and the
+fun could begin. But at no other time did this busy man suffer his work
+to interfere with that first duty to his children; and there is a
+pleasant tale of the inventive Master Frewen, engaged at the time upon a
+toy crane, bringing to the study where his father sat at work a
+half-wound reel that formed some part of his design, and observing,
+"Papa, you might finiss windin' this for me; I am so very busy to-day."
+
+I put together here a few brief extracts from Fleeming's letters, none
+very important in itself, but all together building up a pleasant
+picture of the father with his sons.
+
+  "_Jan. 15th, 1875._--Frewen contemplates suspending soap-bubbles by
+  silk threads for experimental purposes. I don't think he will manage
+  that. Bernard" [the youngest] "volunteered to blow the bubbles with
+  enthusiasm."
+
+  "_Jan. 17th._--I am learning a great deal of electrostatics in
+  consequence of the perpetual cross-examination to which I am
+  subjected. I long for you on many grounds, but one is that I may not
+  be obliged to deliver a running lecture on abstract points of science,
+  subject to cross-examination by two acute students. Bernie does not
+  cross-examine much; but if any one gets discomfited, he laughs a sort
+  of little silver-whistle giggle, which is trying to the unhappy
+  blunderer."
+
+  "_May 9th._--Frewen is deep in parachutes. I beg him not to drop from
+  the top landing in one of his own making."
+
+  "_June 6th, 1876._--Frewen's crank axle is a failure just at
+  present--but he bears up."
+
+  "_June 14th._--The boys enjoy their riding. It gets them whole funds
+  of adventures. One of their caps falling off is matter for delightful
+  reminiscences; and when a horse breaks his step, the occurrence
+  becomes a rear, a shy, or a plunge as they talk it over. Austin, with
+  quiet confidence, speaks of the greater pleasure in riding a spirited
+  horse, even if he does give a little trouble. It is the stolid brute
+  that he dislikes. (N.B.--You can still see six inches between him and
+  the saddle when his pony trots.) I listen and sympathise and throw out
+  no hint that their achievements are not really great."
+
+  "_June 18th._--Bernard is much impressed by the fact that I can be
+  useful to Frewen about the steamboat" [which the latter irrepressible
+  inventor was making]. "He says quite with awe, 'He would not have got
+  on nearly so well if you had not helped him.'"
+
+  "_June 27th._--I do not see what I could do without Austin. He talks
+  so pleasantly, and is so truly good all through."
+
+  "_July 7th._--My chief difficulty with Austin is to get him measured
+  for a pair of trousers. Hitherto I have failed, but I keep a stout
+  heart and mean to succeed. Frewen the observer, in describing the
+  paces of two horses, says, 'Polly takes twenty-seven steps to get
+  round the school. I couldn't count Sophy, but she takes more than a
+  hundred.'"
+
+  "_Feb. 18th, 1877._--We all feel very lonely without you. Frewen had
+  to come up and sit in my room for company last night, and I actually
+  kissed him, a thing that has not occurred for years. Jack, poor
+  fellow, bears it as well as he can, and has taken the opportunity of
+  having a fester on his foot, so he is lame, and has it bathed, and
+  this occupies his thoughts a good deal."
+
+  "_Feb. 19th._--As to Mill, Austin has not got the list yet. I think it
+  will prejudice him very much against Mill--but that is not my affair.
+  Education of that kind!... I would as soon cram my boys with food, and
+  boast of the pounds they had eaten, as cram them with literature."
+
+But if Fleeming was an anxious father, he did not suffer his anxiety to
+prevent the boys from any manly or even dangerous pursuit. Whatever it
+might occur to them to try, he would carefully show them how to do it,
+explain the risks, and then either share the danger himself or, if that
+were not possible, stand aside and wait the event with that unhappy
+courage of the looker-on. He was a good swimmer, and taught them to
+swim. He thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during their
+holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and encouraged them
+to excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to fish, to walk, to pull an
+oar, to hand, reef and steer, and to run a steam-launch. In all of
+these, and in all parts of Highland life, he shared delightedly. He was
+well on to forty when he took once more to shooting, he was forty-three
+when he killed his first salmon, but no boy could have more
+single-mindedly rejoiced in these pursuits. His growing love for the
+Highland character, perhaps also a sense of the difficulty of the task,
+led him to take up at forty-one the study of Gaelic; in which he made
+some shadow of progress, but not much: the fastnesses of that elusive
+speech retaining to the last their independence. At the house of his
+friend Mrs. Blackburn, who plays the part of a Highland lady as to the
+manner born, he learned the delightful custom of kitchen dances, which
+became the rule at his own house, and brought him into yet nearer
+contact with his neighbours. And thus, at forty-two, he began to learn
+the reel; a study to which he brought his usual smiling earnestness; and
+the steps, diagrammatically represented by his own hand, are before me
+as I write.
+
+It was in 1879 that a new feature was added to the Highland life: a
+steam-launch, called the _Purgle_, the Styrian corruption of Walpurga,
+after a friend to be hereafter mentioned. "The steam-launch goes,"
+Fleeming wrote. "I wish you had been present to describe two scenes of
+which she has been the occasion already: one during which the population
+of Ullapool, to a baby, was harnessed to her hurrahing--and the other in
+which the same population sat with its legs over a little pier, watching
+Frewen and Bernie getting up steam for the first time." The _Purgle_ was
+got with educational intent; and it served its purpose so well, and the
+boys knew their business so practically, that when the summer was at an
+end, Fleeming, Mrs. Jenkin, Frewen the engineer, Bernard the stoker, and
+Kenneth Robertson, a Highland seaman, set forth in her to make the
+passage south. The first morning they got from Loch Broom into Gruinard
+Bay, where they lunched upon an island; but the wind blowing up in the
+afternoon, with sheets of rain, it was found impossible to beat to sea;
+and very much in the situation of castaways upon an unknown coast, the
+party landed at the mouth of Gruinard river. A shooting-lodge was spied
+among the trees; there Fleeming went; and though the master, Mr. Murray,
+was from home, though the two Jenkin boys were of course as black as
+colliers, and all the castaways so wetted through that, as they stood in
+the passage, pools formed about their feet and ran before them into the
+house, yet Mrs. Murray kindly entertained them for the night. On the
+morrow, however, visitors were to arrive; there would be no room and, in
+so out-of-the-way a spot, most probably no food for the crew of the
+_Purgle_; and on the morrow about noon, with the bay white with
+spindrift and the wind so strong that one could scarcely stand against
+it, they got up steam and skulked under the land as far as Sanda Bay.
+Here they crept into a seaside cave, and cooked some food; but the
+weather now freshening to a gale, it was plain they must moor the launch
+where she was, and find their way overland to some place of shelter.
+Even to get their baggage from on board was no light business; for the
+dingy was blown so far to leeward every trip, that they must carry her
+back by hand along the beach. But this once managed, and a cart procured
+in the neighbourhood, they were able to spend the night in a pot-house
+at Ault Bea. Next day, the sea was unapproachable; but the next they had
+a pleasant passage to Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell
+bursting close by them in the gullies, and the black scarts that sat
+like ornaments on the top of every stack and pinnacle, looking down into
+the _Purgle_ as she passed. The climate of Scotland had not done with
+them yet: for three days they lay storm-stayed in Poolewe, and when they
+put to sea on the morning of the fourth, the sailors prayed them for
+God's sake not to attempt the passage. Their setting out was indeed
+merely tentative; but presently they had gone too far to return, and
+found themselves committed to double Rhu Reay with a foul wind and a
+cross sea. From half-past eleven in the morning until half-past five at
+night, they were in immediate and unceasing danger. Upon the least
+mishap, the _Purgle_ must either have been swamped by the seas or bulged
+upon the cliffs of that rude headland. Fleeming and Robertson took turns
+baling and steering; Mrs. Jenkin, so violent was the commotion of the
+boat, held on with both hands; Frewen, by Robertson's direction, ran the
+engine, slacking and pressing her to meet the seas; and Bernard, only
+twelve years old, deadly sea-sick, and continually thrown against the
+boiler, so that he was found next day to be covered with burns, yet
+kept an even fire. It was a very thankful party that sat down that
+evening to meat in the hotel at Gairloch. And perhaps, although the
+thing was new in the family, no one was much surprised when Fleeming
+said grace over that meal. Thenceforward he continued to observe the
+form, so that there was kept alive in his house a grateful memory of
+peril and deliverance. But there was nothing of the muff in Fleeming; he
+thought it a good thing to escape death, but a becoming and a healthful
+thing to run the risk of it; and what is rarer, that which he thought
+for himself, he thought for his family also. In spite of the terrors of
+Rhu Reay, the cruise was persevered in, and brought to an end under
+happier conditions.
+
+One year, instead of the Highlands, Alt-Aussee, in the Steiermark, was
+chosen for the holidays; and the place, the people, and the life
+delighted Fleeming. He worked hard at German, which he had much
+forgotten since he was a boy; and, what is highly characteristic,
+equally hard at the _patois_, in which he learned to excel. He won a
+prize at a Schuetzen-fest; and though he hunted chamois without much
+success, brought down more interesting game in the shape of the Styrian
+peasants, and in particular of his gillie, Joseph. This Joseph was much
+of a character; and his appreciations of Fleeming have a fine note of
+their own. The bringing up of the boys he deigned to approve of: "_fast
+so gut wie ein Bauer_," was his trenchant criticism. The attention and
+courtly respect with which Fleeming surrounded his wife was something of
+a puzzle to the philosophic gillie; he announced in the village that
+Mrs. Jenkin--_die silberne Frau_, as the folk had prettily named her
+from some silver ornaments--was a "_geborene Graefin_" who had married
+beneath her; and when Fleeming explained what he called the English
+theory (though indeed it was quite his own) of married relations,
+Joseph, admiring but unconvinced, avowed it was "_gar schoen_." Joseph's
+cousin, Walpurga Moser, to an orchestra of clarionet and zither, taught
+the family the country dances, the Steierisch and the Laendler, and
+gained their hearts during the lessons. Her sister Loys, too, who was up
+at the Alp with the cattle, came down to church on Sundays, made
+acquaintance with the Jenkins, and must have them up to see the sunrise
+from her house upon the Loser, where they had supper and all slept in
+the loft among the hay. The Mosers were not lost sight of; Walpurga
+still corresponds with Mrs. Jenkin, and it was a late pleasure of
+Fleeming's to choose and despatch a wedding present for his little
+mountain friend. This visit was brought to an end by a ball in the big
+inn parlour; the refreshments chosen, the list of guests drawn up, by
+Joseph; the best music of the place in attendance; and hosts and guests
+in their best clothes. The ball was opened by Mrs. Jenkin dancing
+Steierisch with a lordly Bauer, in grey and silver and with a plumed
+hat; and Fleeming followed with Walpurga Moser.
+
+There ran a principle through all these holiday pleasures. In Styria, as
+in the Highlands, the same course was followed: Fleeming threw himself
+as fully as he could into the life and occupations of the native people,
+studying everywhere their dances and their language, and conforming,
+always with pleasure, to their rustic etiquette. Just as the ball at
+Alt-Aussee was designed for the taste of Joseph, the parting feast at
+Attadale was ordered in every particular to the taste of Murdoch, the
+keeper. Fleeming was not one of the common, so-called gentlemen, who
+take the tricks of their own coterie to be eternal principles of taste.
+He was aware, on the other hand, that rustic people dwelling in their
+own places follow ancient rules with fastidious precision, and are
+easily shocked and embarrassed by what (if they used the word) they
+would have to call the vulgarity of visitors from town. And he, who was
+so cavalier with men of his own class, was sedulous to shield the more
+tender feelings of the peasant; he, who could be so trying in a
+drawing-room, was even punctilious in the cottage. It was in all
+respects a happy virtue. It renewed his life, during these holidays, in
+all particulars. It often entertained him with the discovery of strange
+survivals; as when, by the orders of Murdoch, Mrs. Jenkin must publicly
+taste of every dish before it was set before her guests. And thus to
+throw himself into a fresh life and a new school of manners was a
+grateful exercise of Fleeming's mimetic instinct; and to the pleasures
+of the open air, of hardships supported, of dexterities improved and
+displayed, and of plain and elegant society, added a spice of drama.
+
+
+  II
+
+Fleeming was all his life a lover of the play and all that belonged to
+it. Dramatic literature he knew fully. He was one of the not very
+numerous people who can read a play: a knack, the fruit of much
+knowledge and some imagination, comparable to that of reading score. Few
+men better understood the artificial principles on which a play is good
+or bad; few more unaffectedly enjoyed a piece of any merit of
+construction. His own play was conceived with a double design; for he
+had long been filled with his theory of the true story of Griselda; used
+to gird at Father Chaucer for his misconception; and was, perhaps first
+of all, moved by the desire to do justice to the Marquis of Saluces, and
+perhaps only in the second place by the wish to treat a story (as he
+phrased it) like a sum in arithmetic. I do not think he quite succeeded;
+but I must own myself no fit judge. Fleeming and I were teacher and
+taught as to the principles, disputatious rivals in the practice, of
+dramatic writing.
+
+Acting had always, ever since Rachel and the "_Marseillaise_," a
+particular power on him. "If I do not cry at the play," he used to say,
+"I want to have my money back." Even from a poor play with poor actors
+he could draw pleasure. "Glacometti's _Elisabetta_," I find him
+writing, "fetched the house vastly. Poor Queen Elizabeth! And yet it was
+a little good." And again, after a night of Salvini: "I do not suppose
+any one with feelings could sit out _Othello_ if Iago and Desdemona were
+acted." Salvini was, in his view, the greatest actor he had seen. We
+were all indeed moved and bettered by the visit of that wonderful
+man.--"I declare I feel as if I could pray!" cried one of us, on the
+return from _Hamlet_.--"That is prayer," said Fleeming. W. B. Hole and
+I, in a fine enthusiasm of gratitude, determined to draw up an address
+to Salvini, did so, and carried it to Fleeming; and I shall never forget
+with what coldness he heard and deleted the eloquence of our draft, nor
+with what spirit (our vanities once properly mortified) he threw himself
+into the business of collecting signatures. It was his part, on the
+ground of his Italian, to see and arrange with the actor; it was mine to
+write in the _Academy_ a notice of the first performance of _Macbeth_.
+Fleeming opened the paper, read so far, and flung it on the floor. "No,"
+he cried, "that won't do. You were thinking of yourself, not of
+Salvini!" The criticism was shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through
+ignorance; it was not of myself that I was thinking, but of the
+difficulties of my trade, which I had not well mastered. Another
+unalloyed dramatic pleasure, which Fleeming and I shared the year of the
+Paris Exposition, was the _Marquis de Villemer_, that blameless play,
+performed by Madeleine Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat--an actress,
+in such parts at least, to whom I have never seen full justice rendered.
+He had his fill of weeping on that occasion; and when the piece was at
+an end, in front of a cafe, in the mild, midnight air, we had our fill
+of talk about the art of acting.
+
+But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an inheritance
+from Norwich, from Edward Barren, and from Enfield of the "Speaker." The
+theatre was one of Edward Barren's elegant hobbies; he read plays, as
+became Enfield's son-in-law, with a good discretion; he wrote plays for
+his family, in which Eliza Barron used to shine in the chief parts; and
+later in life, after the Norwich home was broken up, his little
+granddaughter would sit behind him in a great arm-chair, and be
+introduced, with his stately elocution, to the world of dramatic
+literature. From this, in a direct line, we can deduce the charades at
+Claygate; and after money came, in the Edinburgh days, that private
+theatre which took up so much of Fleeming's energy and thought. The
+company--Mr. and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain
+Charles Douglas, Mr. Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr.
+Charles Baxter, and many more--made a charming society for themselves,
+and gave pleasure to their audience. Mr. Carter in Sir Toby Belch it
+would be hard to beat. Mr. Hole in broad farce, or as the herald in the
+_Trachiniae_, showed true stage talent. As for Mrs. Jenkin, it was for
+her the rest of us existed and were forgiven; her powers were an endless
+spring of pride and pleasure to her husband; he spent hours hearing and
+schooling her in private; and when it came to the performance, though
+there was perhaps no one in the audience more critical, none was more
+moved than Fleeming. The rest of us did not aspire so high. There were
+always five performances and weeks of busy rehearsal; and whether we
+came to sit and stifle as the prompter, to be the dumb (or rather the
+inarticulate) recipients of Carter's dog whip in the _Taming of the
+Shrew_, or, having earned our spurs, to lose one more illusion in a
+leading part, we were always sure at least of a long and an exciting
+holiday in mirthful company.
+
+In this laborious annual diversion Fleeming's part was large. I never
+thought him an actor, but he was something of a mimic, which stood him
+in stead. Thus he had seen Got in Poirier; and his own Poirier, when he
+came to play it, breathed meritoriously of the model. The last part I
+saw him play was Triplet, and at first I thought it promised well. But
+alas! the boys went for a holiday, missed a train, and were not heard of
+at home till late at night. Poor Fleeming, the man who never hesitated
+to give his sons a chisel or a gun, or to send them abroad in a canoe or
+on a horse, toiled all day at his rehearsal, growing hourly paler,
+Triplet growing hourly less meritorious. And though the return of the
+children, none the worse for their little adventure, brought the colour
+back into his face, it could not restore him to his part. I remember
+finding him seated on the stairs in some rare moment of quiet during the
+subsequent performances. "Hullo, Jenkin," said I, "you look down in the
+mouth." "My dear boy," said he, "haven't you heard me? I have not had
+one decent intonation from beginning to end."
+
+But indeed he never supposed himself an actor; took a part, when he took
+any, merely for convenience, as one takes a hand at whist; and found his
+true service and pleasure in the more congenial business of the manager.
+Augier, Racine, Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere's
+translation, Sophocles and AEschylus in Lewis Campbell's, such were some
+of the authors whom he introduced to his public. In putting these upon
+the stage, he found a thousand exercises for his ingenuity and taste, a
+thousand problems arising which he delighted to study, a thousand
+opportunities to make those infinitesimal improvements which are so much
+in art and for the artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the
+professional costumier, with unforgettable results of comicality and
+indecorum; the second, the _Trachiniae_ of Sophocles, he took in hand
+himself, and a delightful task he made of it. His study was then in
+antiquarian books, where he found confusion, and on statues and
+bas-reliefs, where he at last found clearness; after an hour or so at
+the British Museum he was able to master "the chiton, sleeves and all";
+and before the time was ripe he had a theory of Greek tailoring at his
+fingers' ends, and had all the costumes made under his eye as a Greek
+tailor would have made them. "The Greeks made the best plays and the
+best statues, and were the best architects; of course, they were the
+best tailors too," said he; and was never weary, when he could find a
+tolerant listener, of dwelling on the simplicity, the economy, the
+elegance both of means and effect, which made their system so
+delightful.
+
+But there is another side to the stage-manager's employment. The
+discipline of acting is detestable; the failures and triumphs of that
+business appeal too directly to the vanity; and even in the course of a
+careful amateur performance such as ours, much of the smaller side of
+man will be displayed. Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and
+levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he
+might be wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all
+his, and he must decide. He was, in this as in all other things, an iron
+taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it
+at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able. I have
+known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the
+same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon.
+And yet he gained and retained warm feelings from far the most of those
+who fell under his domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to
+remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete
+accomplishments of a girls' school, there was something at first
+annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of
+accomplishment and perseverance.
+
+
+  III
+
+It did not matter why he entered upon any study or employment, whether
+for amusement, like the Greek tailoring or the Highland reels, whether
+from a desire to serve the public, as with his sanitary work, or in the
+view of benefiting poorer men, as with his labours for technical
+education, he "pitched into it" (as he would have said himself) with the
+same headlong zest. I give in the Appendix[28] a letter from Colonel
+Fergusson, which tells fully the nature of the sanitary work and of
+Fleeming's part and success in it. It will be enough to say here that it
+was a scheme of protection against the blundering of builders and the
+dishonesty of plumbers. Started with an eye rather to the houses of the
+rich, Fleeming hoped his Sanitary Associations would soon extend their
+sphere of usefulness, and improve the dwellings of the poor. In this
+hope he was disappointed; but in all other ways the scheme exceedingly
+prospered, associations sprang up and continue to spring up in many
+quarters, and wherever tried they have been found of use.
+
+Here, then, was a serious employment; it has proved highly useful to
+mankind; and it was begun, besides, in a mood of bitterness, under the
+shock of what Fleeming would so sensitively feel--the death of a whole
+family of children. Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read in
+Colonel Fergusson's letter that his schoolmates bantered him when he
+began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter,
+as he always did, with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the
+question: "And now do you see any other jokes to make? Well, then," said
+he, "that's all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we
+can be serious." And then with a glowing heat of pleasure, he laid his
+plans before me, revelling in the details, revelling in hope. It was as
+he wrote about the joy of electrical experiment: "What shall I compare
+them to?--A new song? a Greek play?" Delight attended the exercise of
+all his powers; delight painted the future. Of these ideal visions, some
+(as I have said) failed of their fruition. And the illusion was
+characteristic. Fleeming believed we had only to make a virtue cheap and
+easy, and then all would practise it; that for an end unquestionably
+good men would not grudge a little trouble and a little money, though
+they might stumble at laborious pains and generous sacrifices. He could
+not believe in any resolute badness. "I cannot quite say," he wrote in
+his young manhood, "that I think there is no sin or misery. This I can
+say: I do not remember one single malicious act done to myself. In fact,
+it is rather awkward when I have to say the Lord's Prayer. I have
+nobody's trespasses to forgive." And to the point, I remember one of our
+discussions. I said it was a dangerous error not to admit there were bad
+people; he, that it was only a confession of blindness on our part, and
+that we probably called others bad only so far as we were wrapped in
+ourselves and lacking in the transmigratory forces of imagination. I
+undertook to describe to him three persons irredeemably bad, and whom he
+should admit to be so. In the first case he denied my evidence: "You
+cannot judge a man upon such testimony," said he. For the second, he
+owned it made him sick to hear the tale; but then there was no spark of
+malice, it was mere weakness I had described, and he had never denied
+nor thought to set a limit to man's weakness. At my third gentleman he
+struck his colours. "Yes," said he, "I'm afraid that _is_ a bad man."
+And then, looking at me shrewdly: "I wonder if it isn't a very
+unfortunate thing for you to have met him." I showed him radiantly how
+it was the world we must know, the world as it was, not a world
+expurgated and prettified with optimistic rainbows. "Yes, yes," said he;
+"but this badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won't you be
+tempted to use it, instead of trying to understand people?"
+
+In the year 1878 he took a passionate fancy for the phonograph: it was a
+toy after his heart, a toy that touched the skirts of life, art and
+science, a toy prolific of problems and theories. Something fell to be
+done for a University Cricket-Ground Bazaar. "And the thought struck
+him," Mr. Ewing writes to me, "to exhibit Edison's phonograph, then the
+very newest scientific marvel. The instrument itself was not to be
+purchased--I think no specimen had then crossed the Atlantic,--but a
+copy of the _Times_ with an account of it was at hand, and by the help
+of this we made a phonograph which to our great joy talked, and talked,
+too, with the purest American accent. It was so good that a second
+instrument was got ready forthwith. Both were shown at the Bazaar: one
+by Mrs. Jenkin, to people willing to pay half a crown for a private view
+and the privilege of hearing their own voices, while Jenkin, perfervid
+as usual, gave half-hourly lectures on the other in an adjoining
+room--I, as his lieutenant, taking turns. The thing was in its way a
+little triumph. A few of the visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief
+that they were the victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle. Of the
+others, many who came to scoff remained to take raffle tickets; and one
+of the phonographs was finally disposed of in this way." The other
+remained in Fleeming's hands, and was a source of infinite occupation.
+Once it was sent to London, "to bring back on the tinfoil the tones of a
+lady distinguished for clear vocalisation"; at another time "Sir Robert
+Christison was brought in to contribute his powerful bass"; and there
+scarcely came a visitor about the house but he was made the subject of
+experiment. The visitors, I am afraid, took their parts lightly: Mr.
+Hole and I, with unscientific laughter, commemorating various shades of
+Scottish accent, or proposing to "teach the poor dumb animal to swear."
+But Fleeming and Mr. Ewing, when we butterflies were gone, were
+laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later years of my
+friend were caught from the small utterance of that toy. Thence came his
+inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of
+literary art; his papers on vowel-sounds, his papers in the _Saturday
+Review_ upon the laws of verse, and many a strange approximation, many a
+just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of
+his interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph,
+because it seems to me that it depicts the man. So, for Fleeming, one
+thing joined into another, the greater with the less. He cared not where
+it was he scratched the surface of the ultimate mystery--in the child's
+toy, in the great tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the
+properties of energy or mass--certain that whatever he touched, it was a
+part of life--and however he touched it, there would flow for his happy
+constitution interest and delight. "All fables have their morals," says
+Thoreau, "but the innocent enjoy the story." There is a truth
+represented for the imagination in those lines of a noble poem, where we
+are told that in our highest hours of visionary clearness we can but
+
+        "see the children sport upon the shore,
+  And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
+
+To this clearness Fleeming had attained; and although he heard the voice
+of the eternal seas and weighed its message, he was yet able, until the
+end of his life, to sport upon these shores of death and mystery with
+the gaiety and innocence of children.
+
+
+  IV
+
+It was as a student that I first knew Fleeming, as one of that modest
+number of young men who sat under his ministrations in a soul-chilling
+class-room at the top of the University buildings. His presence was
+against him as a professor: no one, least of all students, would have
+been moved to respect him at first sight: rather short in stature,
+markedly plain, boyishly young in manner, cocking his head like a
+terrier with every mark of the most engaging vivacity and readiness to
+be pleased, full of words, full of paradox, a stranger could scarcely
+fail to look at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could
+scarcely fail to be engaged by him in talk, but a student would never
+regard him as academical. Yet he had that fibre in him that order always
+existed in his class-room. I do not remember that he ever addressed me
+in language; at the least sign of unrest his eye would fall on me and I
+was quelled. Such a feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I
+have misbehaved in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than
+Fleeming Jenkin's. He was simply a man from whose reproof one shrank; in
+manner the least buckramed of mankind, he had, in serious moments, an
+extreme dignity of goodness. So it was that he obtained a power over the
+most insubordinate of students, but a power of which I was myself
+unconscious. I was inclined to regard any professor as a joke, and
+Fleeming as a particularly good joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast
+pleasantry of my curriculum. I was not able to follow his lectures; I
+somehow dared not misconduct myself, as was my customary solace; and I
+refrained from attending. This brought me at the end of the session into
+a relation with my contemned professor that completely opened my eyes.
+During the year, bad student as I was, he had shown a certain leaning to
+my society; I had been to his house, he had asked me to take a humble
+part in his theatricals; I was a master in the art of extracting a
+certificate even at the cannon's mouth; and I was under no apprehension.
+But when I approached Fleeming, I found myself in another world; he
+would have naught of me. "It is quite useless for _you_ to come to me,
+Mr. Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases, there is no doubt about
+yours. You have simply _not_ attended my class." The document was
+necessary to me for family considerations; and presently I stooped to
+such pleadings and rose to such adjurations as make my ears burn to
+remember. He was quite unmoved; he had no pity for me.--"You are no
+fool," said he, "and you chose your course." I showed him that he had
+misconceived his duty, that certificates were things of form, attendance
+a matter of taste. Two things, he replied, had been required for
+graduation: a certain competency proved in the final trials, and a
+certain period of genuine training proved by certificate; if he did as I
+desired, not less than if he gave me hints for an examination, he was
+aiding me to steal a degree. "You see, Mr. Stevenson, these are the
+laws, and I am here to apply them," said he. I could not say but that
+this view was tenable, though it was new to me; I changed my attack: it
+was only for my father's eye that I required his signature, it need
+never go to the Senatus, I had already certificates enough to justify my
+year's attendance. "Bring them to me; I cannot take your word for that,"
+said he. "Then I will consider." The next day I came charged with my
+certificates, a humble assortment. And when he had satisfied himself,
+"Remember," said he, "that I can promise nothing, but I will try to find
+a form of words." He did find one, and I am still ashamed when I think
+of his shame in giving me that paper. He made no reproach in speech, but
+his manner was the more eloquent; it told me plainly what a dirty
+business we were on; and I went from his presence, with my certificate
+indeed in my possession, but with no answerable sense of triumph. That
+was the bitter beginning of my love for Fleeming; I never thought
+lightly of him afterwards.
+
+Once, and once only, after our friendship was truly founded did we come
+to a considerable difference. It was, by the rules of poor humanity, my
+fault and his. I had been led to dabble in society journalism; and this
+coming to his ears, he felt it like a disgrace upon himself. So far he
+was exactly in the right; but he was scarce happily inspired when he
+broached the subject at his own table and before guests who were
+strangers to me. It was the sort of error he was always ready to repent,
+but always certain to repeat; and on this occasion he spoke so freely
+that I soon made an excuse and left the house, with the firm purpose of
+returning no more. About a month later I met him at dinner at a common
+friend's. "Now," said he, on the stairs, "I engage you--like a lady to
+dance--for the end of the evening. You have no right to quarrel with me
+and not give me a chance." I have often said and thought that Fleeming
+had no tact; he belied the opinion then. I remember perfectly how, so
+soon as we could get together, he began his attack: "You may have
+grounds of quarrel with me; you have none against Mrs. Jenkin; and
+before I say another word, I want you to promise you will come to _her_
+house as usual." An interview thus begun could have but one ending: if
+the quarrel were the fault of both, the merit of reconciliation was
+entirely Fleeming's.
+
+When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally enough on his
+part, he had still something of the Puritan, something of the inhuman
+narrowness of the good youth. It fell from him slowly, year by year, as
+he continued to ripen, and grow milder, and understand more generously
+the mingled characters of men. In the early days he once read me a
+bitter lecture; and I remember leaving his house in a fine spring
+afternoon, with the physical darkness of despair upon my eyesight. Long
+after he made me a formal retractation of the sermon and a formal
+apology for the pain he had inflicted; adding drolly, but truly, "You
+see, at that time I was so much younger than you!" And yet even in those
+days there was much to learn from him; and above all his fine spirit of
+piety, bravely and trustfully accepting life, and his singular delight
+in the heroic.
+
+His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance. His views (as they
+are called) upon religious matters varied much; and he could never be
+induced to think them more or less than views. "All dogma is to me mere
+form," he wrote; "dogmas are mere blind struggles to express the
+inexpressible. I cannot conceive that any single proposition whatever in
+religion is true in the scientific sense; and yet all the while I think
+the religious view of the world is the most true view. Try to separate
+from the mass of their statements that which is common to Socrates,
+Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet,
+Bunyan--yes, and George Eliot: of course you do not believe that this
+something could be written down in a set of propositions like Euclid,
+neither will you deny that there is something common, and this something
+very valuable.... I shall be sorry if the boys ever give a moment's
+thought to the question of what community they belong to--I hope they
+will belong to the great community." I should observe that as time went
+on his conformity to the Church in which he was born grew more complete,
+and his views drew nearer the conventional. "The longer I live, my dear
+Louis," he wrote but a few months before his death, "the more convinced
+I become of a direct care by God--which is reasonably impossible--but
+there it is." And in his last year he took the Communion.
+
+But at the time when I fell under his influence he stood more aloof; and
+this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist. He had a keen
+sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained
+all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once
+made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and
+reason. But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing that words
+stand symbol for the indefinable. I came to him once with a problem
+which had puzzled me out of measure: What is a cause? why out of so many
+innumerable millions of conditions, all necessary, should one be singled
+out and ticketed "the cause"? "You do not understand," said he. "A cause
+is the answer to a question: it designates that condition which I happen
+to know, and you happen not to know." It was thus, with partial
+exception of the mathematical, that he thought of all means of
+reasoning: they were in his eyes but means of communication, so to be
+understood, so to be judged, and only so far to be credited. The
+mathematical he made, I say, exception of: number and measure he
+believed in to the extent of their significance, but that significance,
+he was never weary of reminding you, was slender to the verge of
+nonentity. Science was true, because it told us almost nothing. With a
+few abstractions it could deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly
+faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and this
+high dialect of the wise became a childish jargon.
+
+Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more
+complete than his own, so that the very weapons of the fight were
+changed in his grasp to swords of paper. Certainly the church is not
+right, he would argue, but certainly not the anti-church either. Men are
+not such fools as to be wholly in the wrong, nor yet are they so placed
+as to be ever wholly in the right. Somewhere, in mid air between the
+disputants, like hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, the
+truth hangs undiscerned. And in the meanwhile what matter these
+uncertainties? Right is very obvious; a great consent of the best of
+mankind, a loud voice within us (whether of God, or whether by
+inheritance, and in that case still from God), guide and command us in
+the path of duty. He saw life very simple; he did not love refinements;
+he was a friend to much conformity in unessentials. For (he would argue)
+it is in this life, as it stands about us, that we are given our
+problem; the manners of the day are the colours of our palette; they
+condition, they constrain us; and a man must be very sure he is in the
+right, must (in a favourite phrase of his) be "either very wise or very
+vain," to break with any general consent in ethics. I remember taking
+his advice upon some point of conduct. "Now," he said, "how do you
+suppose Christ would have advised you?" and when I had answered that He
+would not have counselled me anything unkind or cowardly, "No," he said,
+with one of his shrewd strokes at the weakness of his hearer, "nor
+anything amusing." Later in life, he made less certain in the field of
+ethics. "The old story of the knowledge of good and evil is a very true
+one," I find him writing; only (he goes on) "the effect of the original
+dose is much worn out, leaving Adam's descendants with the knowledge
+that there is such a thing--but uncertain where." His growing sense of
+this ambiguity made him less swift to condemn, but no less stimulating
+in counsel. "You grant yourself certain freedoms. Very well," he would
+say, "I want to see you pay for them some other way. You positively
+cannot do this: then there positively must be something else that you
+can do, and I want to see you find that out and do it." Fleeming would
+never suffer you to think that you were living, if there were not,
+somewhere in your life, some touch of heroism, to do or to endure.
+
+This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie
+down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings
+of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man's. He loved
+the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage,
+enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that
+lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This
+with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues
+to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the
+jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and
+Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man's unequal character ran
+through all his thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the
+pickthank; being what we are, he wished us to see others with a generous
+eye of admiration, not with the smallness of the seeker after faults. If
+there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was
+upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having found much
+entertainment in Voltaire's "Sauel," and telling him what seemed to me
+the drollest touches. He heard me out, as usual when displeased, and
+then opened fire on me with red-hot shot. To belittle a noble story was
+easy; it was not literature, it was not art, it was not morality; there
+was no sustenance in such a form of jesting, there was (in his favourite
+phrase) "no nitrogenous food" in such literature. And then he proceeded
+to show what a fine fellow David was; and what a hard knot he was in
+about Bathsheba, so that (the initial wrong committed) honour might well
+hesitate in the choice of conduct; and what owls those people were who
+marvelled because an Eastern tyrant had killed Uriah, instead of
+marvelling that he had not killed the prophet also. "Now if Voltaire had
+helped me to feel that," said he, "I could have seen some fun in it." He
+loved the comedy which shows a hero human, and yet leaves him a hero;
+and the laughter which does not lessen love.
+
+It was this taste for what is fine in humankind that ruled his choice in
+books. These should all strike a high note, whether brave or tender, and
+smack of the open air. The noble and simple presentation of things noble
+and simple, that was the "nitrogenous food" of which he spoke so much,
+which he sought so eagerly, enjoyed so royally. He wrote to an author,
+the first part of whose story he had seen with sympathy, hoping that it
+might continue in the same vein. "That this may be so," he wrote, "I
+long with the longing of David for the water of Bethlehem. But no man
+need die for the water a poet can give, and all can drink it to the end
+of time, and their thirst be quenched and the pool never dry--and the
+thirst and the water are both blessed." It was in the Greeks
+particularly that he found this blessed water; he loved "a fresh air"
+which he found "about the Greek things even in translations"; he loved
+their freedom from the mawkish and the rancid. The tale of David in the
+Bible, the "Odyssey," Sophocles, AEschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas
+in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray, and the "Tale of
+Two Cities" out of Dickens: such were some of his preferences. To
+Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; "Burnt Njal" was a late
+favourite; and he found at least a passing entertainment in the
+"Arcadia" and the "Grand Cyrus." George Eliot he outgrew, finding her
+latterly only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted,
+was great, and must have gone some way to form his mind. He was easily
+set on edge, however, by didactic writing; and held that books should
+teach no other lesson but what "real life would teach, were it as
+vividly presented." Again, it was the thing made that took him, the
+drama in the book; to the book itself, to any merit of the making, he
+was long strangely blind. He would prefer the "Agamemnon" in the prose
+of Mr. Buckley, ay, to Keats. But he was his mother's son, learning to
+the last. He told me one day that literature was not a trade; that it
+was no craft; that the professed author was merely an amateur with a
+door-plate. "Very well," said I, "the first time you get a proof, I will
+demonstrate that it is as much a trade as bricklaying, and that you do
+not know it." By the very next post a proof came. I opened it with fear;
+for he was, indeed, a formidable amateur; always wrote brightly, because
+he always thought trenchantly; and sometimes wrote brilliantly, as the
+worst of whistlers may sometimes stumble on a perfect intonation. But it
+was all for the best in the interests of his education; and I was able,
+over that proof, to give him a quarter of an hour such as Fleeming loved
+both to give and to receive. His subsequent training passed out of my
+hands into those of our common friend, W. E. Henley. "Henley and I," he
+wrote, "have fairly good times wigging one another for not doing better.
+I wig him because he won't try to write a real play, and he wigs me
+because I can't try to write English." When I next saw him he was full
+of his new acquisitions. "And yet I have lost something too," he said
+regretfully. "Up to now Scott seemed to me quite perfect, he was all I
+wanted. Since I have been learning this confounded thing, I took up one
+of the novels, and a great deal of it is both careless and clumsy."
+
+
+  V
+
+He spoke four languages with freedom, not even English with any marked
+propriety. What he uttered was not so much well said, as excellently
+acted: so we may hear every day the inexpressive language of a poorly
+written drama assume character and colour in the hands of a good player.
+No man had more of the _vis comica_ in private life; he played no
+character on the stage as he could play himself among his friends. It
+was one of his special charms; now when the voice is silent and the face
+still, it makes it impossible to do justice to his power in
+conversation. He was a delightful companion to such as can bear bracing
+weather; not to the very vain; not to the owlishly wise, who cannot have
+their dogmas canvassed; not to the painfully refined, whose sentiments
+become articles of faith. The spirit in which he could write that he was
+"much revived by having an opportunity of abusing Whistler to a knot of
+his special admirers" is a spirit apt to be misconstrued. He was not a
+dogmatist, even about Whistler. "The house is full of pretty things," he
+wrote, when on a visit; "but Mrs. ----'s taste in pretty things has one
+very bad fault: it is not my taste." And that was the true attitude of
+his mind; but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and
+wrangle over by the hour. It was no wonder if he loved the Greeks; he
+was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been a sophist and met
+Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and done battle with him
+staunchly and manfully owned his defeat; and the dialogue, arranged by
+Plato, would have shone even in Plato's gallery. He seemed in talk
+aggressive, petulant, full of a singular energy; as vain, you would have
+said, as a peacock, until you trod on his toes, and then you saw that he
+was at least clear of all the sicklier elements of vanity. Soundly rang
+his laugh at any jest against himself. He wished to be taken, as he took
+others, for what was good in him without dissimulation of the evil, for
+what was wise in him without concealment of the childish. He hated a
+draped virtue, and despised a wit on its own defence. And he drew (if I
+may so express myself) a human and humorous portrait of himself with all
+his defects and qualities, as he thus enjoyed in talk the robust sports
+of the intelligence; giving and taking manfully, always without
+pretence, always without paradox, always with exuberant pleasure;
+speaking wisely of what he knew, foolishly of what he knew not; a
+teacher, a learner, but still combative; picking holes in what was said
+even to the length of captiousness, yet aware of all that was said
+rightly; jubilant in victory, delighted by defeat: a Greek sophist, a
+British schoolboy.
+
+Among the legends of what was once a very pleasant spot, the old Savile
+Club, not then divorced from Savile Row, there are many memories of
+Fleeming. He was not popular at first, being known simply as "the man
+who dines here and goes up to Scotland"; but he grew at last, I think,
+the most generally liked of all the members. To those who truly knew and
+loved him, who had tasted the real sweetness of his nature, Fleeming's
+porcupine ways had always been a matter of keen regret. They introduced
+him to their own friends with fear; sometimes recalled the step with
+mortification. It was not possible to look on with patience while a man
+so lovable thwarted love at every step. But the course of time and the
+ripening of his nature brought a cure. It was at the Savile that he
+first remarked a change; it soon spread beyond the walls of the club.
+Presently I find him writing: "Will you kindly explain what has happened
+to me? All my life I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing
+result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to
+me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings,
+but nevertheless the result was that expressed above. Well, lately some
+change has happened. If I talk to a person one day, they must have me
+the next. Faces light up when they see me. 'Ah, I say, come
+here'--'come and dine with me.' It's the most preposterous thing I ever
+experienced. It is curiously pleasant. You have enjoyed it all your
+life, and therefore cannot conceive how bewildering a burst of it is for
+the first time at forty-nine." And this late sunshine of popularity
+still further softened him. He was a bit of a porcupine to the last,
+still shedding darts; or rather he was to the end a bit of a schoolboy,
+and must still throw stones; but the essential toleration that underlay
+his disputatiousness, and the kindness that made of him a tender
+sick-nurse and a generous helper, shone more conspicuously through. A
+new pleasure had come to him; and as with all sound natures, he was
+bettered by the pleasure.
+
+I can best show Fleeming in this later stage by quoting from a vivid and
+interesting letter of M. Emile Trelat's. Here, admirably expressed, is
+how he appeared to a friend of another nation, whom he encountered only
+late in life. M. Trelat will pardon me if I correct, even before I quote
+him; but what the Frenchman supposed to flow from some particular
+bitterness against France, was only Fleeming's usual address. Had M.
+Trelat been Italian, Italy would have fared as ill; and yet Italy was
+Fleeming's favourite country.
+
+  Vous savez comment j'ai connu Fleeming Jenkin! C'etait en Mai 1878.
+  Nous etions tous deux membres du jury de l'Exposition Universelle. On
+  n'avait rien fait qui vaille a la premiere seance de notre classe, qui
+  avait eu lieu le matin. Tout le monde avait parle et reparle pour ne
+  rien dire. Cela durait depuis huit heures; il etait midi. Je demandai
+  la parole pour une motion d'ordre, et je proposal que la seance fut
+  levee a la condition que chaque membre francais _emportat_ a dejeuner
+  un jure etranger. Jenkin applaudit. "Je vous emmene dejeuner," lui
+  criai-je. "Je veux bien." ... Nous partimes; en chemin nous vous
+  rencontrions; il vous presente, et nous allons dejeuner tous trois
+  aupres du Trocadero.
+
+  Et, depuis ce temps, nous avons ete de vieux amis. Non seulement nous
+  passions nos journees au jury, ou nous etions toujours ensemble,
+  cote-a-cote. Mais nos habitudes s'etaient faites telles que, non
+  contents de dejeuner en face l'un de l'autre, je le ramenais diner
+  presque tous les jours chez moi. Cela dura une quinzaine: puis il fut
+  rappele en Angleterre. Mais il revint, et nous fimes encore une bonne
+  etape de vie intellectuelle, morale et philosophique. Je crois qu'il
+  me rendait deja tout ce que j'eprouvais de sympathie et d'estime, et
+  que je ne fus pas pour rien dans son retour a Paris.
+
+  Chose singuliere! nous nous etions attaches l'un a l'autre par les
+  sous-entendus bien plus que par la matiere de nos conversations. A
+  vrai dire, nous etions presque toujours en discussion; et il nous
+  arrivait de nous rire au nez l'un et l'autre pendant des heures, tant
+  nous nous etonnions reciproquement de la diversite de nos points de
+  vue. Je le trouvais si anglais, et il me trouvait si francais! Il
+  etait si franchement revolte de certaines choses qu'il voyait chez
+  nous, et je comprenais si mal certaines choses qui se passaient chez
+  vous! Rien de plus interessant que ces contacts qui etaient des
+  contrastes, et que ces rencontres d'idees qui etaient des choses; rien
+  de si attachant que les echappees de coeur ou d'esprit auxquelles ces
+  petits conflits donnaient a tout moment cours. C'est dans ces
+  conditions que, pendant son sejour a Paris en 1878, je conduisis un
+  peu partout mon nouvel ami. Nous allames chez Madame Edmond Adam, ou
+  il vit passer beaucoup d'hommes politiques avec lesquels il causa.
+  Mais c'est chez les ministres qu'il fut interesse. Le moment etait,
+  d'ailleurs, curieux en France. Je me rappelle que, lorsque je le
+  presentai au Ministre du Commerce, il fit cette spirituelle repartie:
+  "C'est la seconde fois que je viens en France sous la Republique. La
+  premiere fois, c'etait en 1848, elle s'etait coiffee de travers: je
+  suis bien heureux de saluer aujourd'hui Votre Excellence, quand elle a
+  mis son chapeau droit." Une fois je le menai voir couronner la Rosiere
+  de Nanterre. Il y suivit les ceremonies civiles et religieuses; il y
+  assista au banquet donne par le maire; il y vit notre de Lesseps, au
+  quel il porta un toast. Le soir, nous revinmes tard a Paris; il
+  faisait chaud; nous etions un peu fatigues; nous entrames dans un des
+  rares cafes encore ouverts. Il devint silencieux.--"N'etes-vous pas
+  content de votre journee?" lui dis-je.--"O, si! mais je reflechis, et
+  je me dis que vous etes un peuple gai--tous ces braves gens etaient
+  gais aujourd'hui. C'est une vertu, la gaiete, et vous l'avez en
+  France, cette vertu!" Il me disait cela melancoliquement; et c'etait
+  la premiere fois que je lui entendais faire une louange adressee a la
+  France.... Mais il ne faut pas que vous voyiez la une plainte de ma
+  part. Je serais un ingrat si je me plaignais; car il me disait
+  souvent: "Quel bon Francais vous faites!" Et il m'aimait a cause de
+  cela, quoi qu'il semblat n'aimer pas la France. C'etait la un trait de
+  son originalite. Il est vrai qu'il s'en tirait en disant que je ne
+  ressemblai pas a mes compatriotes, ce a quoi il ne connaissait
+  rien!--Tout cela etait fort curieux; car moi-meme, je l'aimais
+  quoiqu'il en eut a mon pays!
+
+  En 1879 il amena son fils Austin a Paris. J'attirai celui-ci. Il
+  dejeunait avec moi deux fois par semaine. Je lui montrai ce qu'etait
+  l'intimite francaise en le tutoyant paternellement. Cela resserra
+  beaucoup nos liens d'intimite avec Jenkin.... Je fis inviter mon ami
+  au congres de l'_Association francaise pour l'avancement des
+  sciences_, qui se tenait a Rheims en 1880. Il y vint. J'eus le
+  plaisir de lui donner la parole dans la section du genie civil et
+  militaire, que je presidais. Il y fit une tres interessante
+  communication, qui me montrait une fois de plus l'originalite de ses
+  vues et la surete de sa science. C'est a l'issue de ce congres que je
+  passai lui faire visite a Rochefort, ou je le trouvai installe en
+  famille et ou je presentai pour la premiere fois mes hommages a son
+  eminente compagne. Je le vis la sous un jour nouveau et touchant pour
+  moi Madame Jenkin, qu'il entourait si galamment, et ses deux jeunes
+  fils donnaient plus de relief a sa personne. J'emportai des quelques
+  heures que je passai a cote de lui dans ce charmant paysage un
+  souvenir emu.
+
+  J'etais alle en Angleterre en 1882 sans pouvoir gagner Edimbourg. J'y
+  retournai en 1883 avec la commission d'assainissement de la ville de
+  Paris, dont je faisais partie. Jenkin me rejoignit. Je le fis entendre
+  par mes collegues; car il etait fondateur d'une societe de salubrite.
+  Il eut un grand succes parmi nous. Mais ce voyage me restera toujours
+  en memoire parce que c'est la que se fixa definitivement notre forte
+  amitie. Il m'invita un jour a diner a son club et au moment de me
+  faire asseoir a cote de lui, il me retint et me dit: "Je voudrais vous
+  demander de m'accorder quelque chose. C'est mon sentiment que nos
+  relations ne peuvent pas se bien continuer si vous ne me donnez pas la
+  permission de vous tutoyer. Voulez-vous que nous nous tutoyions?" Je
+  lui pris les mains et je lui dis qu'une pareille proposition venant
+  d'un Anglais, et d'un Anglais de sa haute distinction, c'etait une
+  victoire, dont je serais fier toute ma vie. Et nous commencions a user
+  de cette nouvelle forme dans nos rapports. Vous savez avec quelle
+  finesse il parlait le francais; comme il en connaissait tous les
+  tours, comme il jouait avec ses difficultes, et meme avec ses petites
+  gamineries. Je crois qu'il a ete heureux de pratiquer avec moi ce
+  tutoiement, qui ne s'adapte pas a l'anglais, et qui est si francais.
+  Je ne puis vous peindre l'etendue et la variete de nos conversations
+  de la soiree. Mais ce que je puis vous dire, c'est que, sous la
+  caresse du _tu_, nos idees se sont elevees. Nous avions toujours
+  beaucoup ri ensemble; mais nous n'avions jamais laisse des banalites
+  s'introduire dans nos echanges de pensees. Ce soir-la, notre horizon
+  intellectuel s'est elargi, et nous y avons pousse des reconnaissances
+  profondes et lointaines. Apres avoir vivement cause a table, nous
+  avons longuement cause au salon; et nous nous separions le soir a
+  Trafalgar Square, apres avoir longe les trottoirs, stationne aux coins
+  des rues et deux fois rebrousse chemin en nous reconduisant l'un
+  l'autre. Il etait pres d'une heure du matin! Mais quelle belle passe
+  d'argumentation, quels beaux echanges de sentiments, quelles fortes
+  confidences patriotiques nous avions fournies! J'ai compris ce soir-la
+  que Jenkin ne detestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les mains
+  en l'embrassant. Nous nous quittions aussi amis qu'on puisse l'etre;
+  et notre affection s'etait par lui etendue et comprise dans un _tu_
+  francais.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [26] Robert Lawson Tait (1845-1899).--ED.
+
+  [27] William Young Sellar (1825-1890).--ED.
+
+  [28] Not reprinted in this edition.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+
+  1875-1885.
+
+   Mrs. Jenkin's illness--Captain Jenkin--The golden wedding--Death of
+   Uncle John--Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin--Illness and death of the
+   Captain--Death of Mrs. Jenkin--Effect on Fleeming--Telpherage--The
+   end.
+
+
+And now I must resume my narrative for that melancholy business that
+concludes all human histories. In January of the year 1875, while
+Fleeming's sky was still unclouded, he was reading Smiles. "I read my
+engineers' lives steadily," he writes, "but find biographies depressing.
+I suspect one reason to be that misfortunes and trials can be
+graphically described, but happiness and the causes of happiness either
+cannot be or are not. A grand new branch of literature opens to my view:
+a drama in which people begin in a poor way and end, after getting
+gradually happier, in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The common novel is not
+the thing at all. It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act
+to close on a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily
+growing all the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where
+things get blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not
+grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by a
+little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new idea
+was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned notion of art.
+Hold a mirror up, indeed! Let's paint a picture of how things ought to
+be, and hold that up to nature, and perhaps the poor old woman may
+repent and mend her ways." The "grand idea" might be possible in art;
+not even the ingenuity of nature could so round in the actual life of
+any man. And yet it might almost seem to fancy that she had read the
+letter and taken the hint; for to Fleeming the cruelties of fate were
+strangely blended with tenderness, and when death came, it came harshly
+to others, to him not unkindly.
+
+In the autumn of that same year 1875, Fleeming's father and mother were
+walking in the garden of their house at Merchiston, when the latter fell
+to the ground. It was thought at the time to be a stumble; it was in all
+likelihood a premonitory stroke of palsy. From that day there fell upon
+her an abiding panic fear; that glib, superficial part of us that speaks
+and reasons could allege no cause, science itself could find no mark of
+danger, a son's solicitude was laid at rest; but the eyes of the body
+saw the approach of a blow, and the consciousness of the body trembled
+at its coming. It came in a moment; the brilliant, spirited old lady
+leapt from her bed, raving. For about six months this stage of her
+disease continued with many painful and many pathetic circumstances; her
+husband, who tended her, her son, who was unwearied in his visits,
+looked for no change in her condition but the change that comes to all.
+"Poor mother," I find Fleeming writing, "I cannot get the tones of her
+voice out of my head.... I may have to bear this pain for a long time;
+and so I am bearing it and sparing myself whatever pain seems useless.
+Mercifully I do sleep, I am so weary that I must sleep." And again
+later: "I could do very well if my mind did not revert to my poor
+mother's state whenever I stop attending to matters immediately before
+me." And the next day: "I can never feel a moment's pleasure without
+having my mother's suffering recalled by the very feeling of happiness.
+A pretty young face recalls hers by contrast--a careworn face recalls it
+by association. I tell you, for I can speak to no one else; but do not
+suppose that I wilfully let my mind dwell on sorrow."
+
+In the summer of the next year the frenzy left her; it left her stone
+deaf and almost entirely aphasic, but with some remains of her old sense
+and courage. Stoutly she set to work with dictionaries, to recover her
+lost tongues; and had already made notable progress when a third stroke
+scattered her acquisitions. Thenceforth, for nearly ten years, stroke
+followed upon stroke, each still further jumbling the threads of her
+intelligence, but by degrees so gradual and with such partiality of loss
+and of survival, that her precise state was always and to the end a
+matter of dispute. She still remembered her friends; she still loved to
+learn news of them upon the slate; she still read and marked the list of
+the subscription library; she still took an interest in the choice of a
+play for the theatricals, and could remember and find parallel passages;
+but alongside of these surviving powers, were lapses as remarkable, she
+misbehaved like a child, and a servant had to sit with her at table. To
+see her so sitting, speaking with the tones of a deaf-mute not always to
+the purpose, and to remember what she had been, was a moving appeal to
+all who knew her. Such was the pathos of these two old people in their
+affliction, that even the reserve of cities was melted and the
+neighbours vied in sympathy and kindness. Where so many were more than
+usually helpful, it is hard to draw distinctions; but I am directed and
+I delight to mention in particular the good Dr. Joseph Bell, Mr. Thomas
+and Mr. Archibald Constable, with both their wives, the Rev. Mr.
+Belcombe (of whose good heart and taste I do not hear for the first
+time--the news had come to me by way of the Infirmary) and their
+next-door neighbour, unwearied in service, Miss Hannah Mayne. Nor should
+I omit to mention that John Ruffini continued to write to Mrs. Jenkin
+till his own death, and the clever lady known to the world as Vernon Lee
+until the end: a touching, a becoming attention to what was only the
+wreck and survival of their brilliant friend.
+
+But he to whom this affliction brought the greatest change was the
+Captain himself. What was bitter in his lot he bore with unshaken
+courage; only once, in these ten years of trial, has Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin
+seen him weep; for the rest of the time his wife--his commanding officer,
+now become his trying child--was served not with patience alone, but with
+a lovely happiness of temper. He had belonged all his life to the
+ancient, formal, speech-making, compliment-presenting school of courtesy;
+the dictates of this code partook in his eyes of the nature of a duty;
+and he must now be courteous for two. Partly from a happy illusion,
+partly in a tender fraud, he kept his wife before the world as a still
+active partner. When he paid a call, he would have her write "with love"
+upon a card; or if that (at the moment) was too much, he would go armed
+with a bouquet and present it in her name. He even wrote letters for her
+to copy and sign: an innocent substitution, which may have caused
+surprise to Ruffini or to Vernon Lee, if they ever received, in the hand
+of Mrs. Jenkin, the very obvious reflections of her husband. He had
+always adored this wife whom he now tended and sought to represent in
+correspondence: it was now, if not before, her turn to repay the
+compliment; mind enough was left her to perceive his unwearied kindness;
+and as her moral qualities seemed to survive quite unimpaired, a childish
+love and gratitude were his reward. She would interrupt a conversation to
+cross the room and kiss him. If she grew excited (as she did too often)
+it was his habit to come behind her chair and pat her shoulder; and then
+she would turn round, and clasp his hand in hers, and look from him to
+her visitor with a face of pride and love; and it was at such moments
+only that the light of humanity revived in her eyes. It was hard for any
+stranger, it was impossible for any that loved them, to behold these mute
+scenes, to recall the past, and not to weep. But to the Captain, I think
+it was all happiness. After these so long years he had found his wife
+again; perhaps kinder than ever before; perhaps now on a more equal
+footing; certainly, to his eyes, still beautiful. And the call made on
+his intelligence had not been made in vain. The merchants of Aux Cayes,
+who had seen him tried in some "counter-revolution" in 1845, wrote to the
+consul of his "able and decided measures," "his cool, steady judgment and
+discernment," with admiration; and of himself, as "a credit and an
+ornament to H.M. Naval Service." It is plain he must have sunk in all his
+powers, during the years when he was only a figure, and often a dumb
+figure, in his wife's drawing-room; but with this new term of service he
+brightened visibly. He showed tact and even invention in managing his
+wife, guiding or restraining her by the touch, holding family worship so
+arranged that she could follow and take part in it. He took (to the
+world's surprise) to reading--voyages, biographies, Blair's Sermons, even
+(for her letters' sake) a work of Vernon Lee's, which proved, however,
+more than he was quite prepared for. He shone more, in his remarkable
+way, in society; and twice he had a little holiday to Glenmorven, where,
+as may be fancied, he was the delight of the Highlanders. One of his last
+pleasures was to arrange his dining-room. Many and many a room (in their
+wandering and thriftless existence) had he seen his wife furnish "with
+exquisite taste" and perhaps with "considerable luxury": now it was his
+turn to be the decorator. On the wall he had an engraving of Lord
+Rodney's action, showing the _Prothee_, his father's ship, if the reader
+recollects; on either side of this, on brackets, his father's sword, and
+his father's telescope, a gift from Admiral Buckner, who had used it
+himself during the engagement; higher yet, the head of his grandson's
+first stag, portraits of his son and his son's wife, and a couple of old
+Windsor jugs from Mrs. Buckner's. But his simple trophy was not yet
+complete; a device had to be worked and framed and hung below the
+engraving; and for this he applied to his daughter-in-law: "I want you to
+work me something, Annie. An anchor at each side--an anchor--stands for
+an old sailor, you know--stands for hope, you know--an anchor at each
+side, and in the middle THANKFUL." It is not easy, on any system of
+punctuation, to represent the Captain's speech. Yet I hope there may
+shine out of these facts, even as there shone through his own troubled
+utterance, some of the charm of that delightful spirit.
+
+In 1881 the time of the golden wedding came round for that sad and
+pretty household. It fell on a Good Friday, and its celebration can
+scarcely be recalled without both smiles and tears. The drawing-room was
+filled with presents and beautiful bouquets; these, to Fleeming and his
+family, the golden bride and bridegroom displayed with unspeakable
+pride, she so painfully excited that the guests feared every moment to
+see her stricken afresh, he guiding and moderating her with his
+customary tact and understanding, and doing the honours of the day with
+more than his usual delight. Thence they were brought to the
+dining-room, where the Captain's idea of a feast awaited them: tea and
+champagne, fruit and toast and childish little luxuries, set forth
+pell-mell and pressed at random on the guests. And here he must make a
+speech for himself and his wife, praising their destiny, their marriage,
+their son, their daughter-in-law, their grandchildren, their manifold
+causes of gratitude: surely the most innocent speech, the old, sharp
+contemner of his innocence now watching him with eyes of admiration.
+Then it was time for the guests to depart; and they went away, bathed,
+even to the youngest child, in tears of inseparable sorrow and gladness,
+and leaving the golden bride and bridegroom to their own society and
+that of the hired nurse.
+
+It was a great thing for Fleeming to make, even thus late, the
+acquaintance of his father; but the harrowing pathos of such scenes
+consumed him. In a life of tense intellectual effort a certain
+smoothness of emotional tenor were to be desired; or we burn the candle
+at both ends. Dr. Bell perceived the evil that was being done; he
+pressed Mrs. Jenkin to restrain her husband from too frequent visits;
+but here was one of those clear-cut, indubitable duties for which
+Fleeming lived, and he could not pardon even the suggestion of neglect.
+
+And now, after death had so long visibly but still innocuously hovered
+above the family, it began at last to strike, and its blows fell thick
+and heavy. The first to go was uncle John Jenkin, taken at last from his
+Mexican dwelling and the lost tribes of Israel; and nothing in this
+remarkable old gentleman's life became him like the leaving of it. His
+sterling, jovial acquiescence in man's destiny was a delight to
+Fleeming. "My visit to Stowting has been a very strange but not at all a
+painful one," he wrote. "In case you ever wish to make a person die as
+he ought to die in a novel," he said to me, "I must tell you all about
+my old uncle." He was to see a nearer instance before long; for this
+family of Jenkin, if they were not very aptly fitted to live, had the
+art of manly dying. Uncle John was but an outsider after all; he had
+dropped out of hail of his nephew's way of life and station in society,
+and was more like some shrewd, old, humble friend who should have kept a
+lodge; yet he led the procession of becoming deaths, and began in the
+mind of Fleeming that train of tender and grateful thought which was
+like a preparation for his own. Already I find him writing in the plural
+of "these impending deaths"; already I find him in quest of consolation.
+"There is little pain in store for these wayfarers," he wrote, "and we
+have hope--more than hope, trust."
+
+On May 19, 1884, Mr. Austin was taken. He was seventy-eight years of
+age, suffered sharply with all his old firmness, and died happy in the
+knowledge that he had left his wife well cared for. This had always been
+a bosom concern; for the Barrons were long-lived and he believed that
+she would long survive him. But their union had been so full and quiet
+that Mrs. Austin languished under the separation. In their last years
+they would sit all evening in their own drawing-room hand in hand: two
+old people who, for all their fundamental differences, had yet grown
+together and become all the world in each other's eyes and hearts; and
+it was felt to be a kind release when, eight months after, on January
+14, 1885, Eliza Barron followed Alfred Austin. "I wish I could save you
+from all pain," wrote Fleeming six days later to his sorrowing wife, "I
+would if I could--but my way is not God's way; and of this be
+assured,--God's way is best."
+
+In the end of the same month Captain Jenkin caught cold and was confined
+to bed. He was so unchanged in spirit that at first there seemed no
+ground of fear; but his great age began to tell, and presently it was
+plain he had a summons. The charm of his sailor's cheerfulness and
+ancient courtesy, as he lay dying, is not to be described. There he lay,
+singing his old sea-songs; watching the poultry from the window with a
+child's delight; scribbling on the slate little messages to his wife,
+who lay bedridden in another room; glad to have Psalms read aloud to
+him, if they were of a pious strain--checking, with an "I don't think we
+need read that, my dear," any that were gloomy or bloody. Fleeming's
+wife coming to the house and asking one of the nurses for news of Mrs.
+Jenkin, "Madam, I do not know," said the nurse; "for I am really so
+carried away by the Captain that I can think of nothing else." One of
+the last messages scribbled to his wife, and sent her with a glass of
+the champagne that had been ordered for himself, ran, in his most
+finished vein of childish madrigal: "The Captain bows to you, my love,
+across the table." When the end was near, and it was thought best that
+Fleeming should no longer go home, but sleep at Merchiston, he broke his
+news to the Captain with some trepidation, knowing that it carried
+sentence of death. "Charming, charming--charming arrangement," was the
+Captain's only commentary. It was the proper thing for a dying man, of
+Captain Jenkin's school of manners, to make some expression of his
+spiritual state; nor did he neglect the observance. With his usual
+abruptness, "Fleeming," said he, "I suppose you and I feel about all
+this as two Christian gentlemen should." A last pleasure was secured for
+him. He had been waiting with painful interest for news of Gordon and
+Khartoum; and by great good fortune a false report reached him that the
+city was relieved, and the men of Sussex (his old neighbours) had been
+the first to enter. He sat up in bed and gave three cheers for the
+Sussex Regiment. The subsequent correction, if it came in time, was
+prudently withheld from the dying man. An hour before midnight on the
+5th of February, he passed away: aged eighty-four.
+
+Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin; and she survived him no
+more than nine-and-forty hours. On the day before her death she received
+a letter from her old friend Miss Bell of Manchester, knew the hand,
+kissed the envelope and laid it on her heart; so that she too died upon
+a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight, on the 8th of February, she
+fell asleep: it is supposed in her seventy-eighth year.
+
+Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of this
+family were taken away; but taken with such features of opportunity in
+time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a
+kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was profound. His pious
+optimism increased and became touched with something mystic and filial.
+"The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible," he had
+written in the beginning of his mother's illness: he thought so no more,
+when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting. He had
+always loved life; in the brief time that now remained to him he seemed
+to be half in love with death. "Grief is no duty," he wrote to Miss
+Bell; "it was all too beautiful for grief," he said to me, but the
+emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths; his
+wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must demolish the
+Captain's trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely
+the same man.
+
+These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his
+vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by hope.
+The singular invention to which he gave the name of "Telpherage" had of
+late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength, and overheated his
+imagination. The words in which he first mentioned his discovery to
+me--"I am simply Alnaschar"--were not only descriptive of his state of
+mind, they were in a sense prophetic; since, whatever fortune may await
+his idea in the future, it was not his to see it bring forth fruit.
+Alnaschar he was indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a
+world filled with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and
+family but all his friends enriched. It was his pleasure, when the
+company was floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at
+least, never knew that he was a possible rich man until the grave had
+closed over his stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming chafed among
+material and business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded; and
+he, like his father and his mother, may be said to have died upon a
+pleasure. But the strain told, and he knew that it was telling. "I am
+becoming a fossil," he had written five years before, as a kind of plea
+for a holiday visit to his beloved Italy. "Take care! If I am Mr.
+Fossil, you will be Mrs. Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all
+the boys will be little fossils, and then we shall be a collection."
+There was no fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no
+repose; he was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first;
+weariness, to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not
+quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate which had
+overtaken his mother; others shared the fear. In the changed life now
+made for his family, the elders dead, the sons going from home upon
+their education, even their tried domestic (Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving
+the house after twenty-two years of service, it was not unnatural that
+he should return to dreams of Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he
+told me) on "a real honeymoon tour." He had not been alone with his
+wife "to speak of," he added, since the birth of his children. But now
+he was to enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days,
+that she was his "Heaven on earth." Now he was to revisit Italy, and see
+all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he admired so
+warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his strenuous
+activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to restore his
+former lightness of foot; and it was a renovated youth that was to set
+forth upon this re-enacted honeymoon.
+
+The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it seemed
+to go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was reading aloud to
+him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to wander in his mind. It
+is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure grasp upon the things of life;
+and he was still unconscious when he passed away, June the 12th, 1885,
+in the fifty-third year of his age. He passed; but something in his
+gallant vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still
+impresses. Not from one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale
+of how the imagination refuses to accept our loss, and instinctively
+looks for his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image
+like things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved too, die and are
+progressively forgotten: two years have passed since Fleeming was laid
+to rest beside his father, his mother, and his uncle John; and the
+thought and the look of our friend still haunts us.
+
+
+
+
+  END OF VOL. IX
+
+
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