Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
Part 1 out of 3
Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined
to publish a selection of his various papers; by way of
introduction, the following pages were drawn up; and the whole,
forming two considerable volumes, has been issued in England. In
the States, it has not been thought advisable to reproduce the
whole; and the memoir appearing alone, shorn of that other matter
which was at once its occasion and its justification, so large an
account of a man so little known may seem to a stranger out of all
proportion. But Jenkin was a man much more remarkable than the
mere bulk or merit of his work approves him. It was in the world,
in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude towards life,
by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort, that he
struck the minds of his contemporaries. His was an individual
figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in
the pages of a novel. His was a face worth painting for its own
sake. If the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait,
if Jenkin, after his death, shall not continue to make new friends,
the fault will be altogether mine.
R. L S.
SARANAC, OCT., 1887.
CHAPTER I.
The Jenkins of Stowting - Fleeming's grandfather - Mrs. Buckner's
fortune - Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King
Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career - The Campbell-
Jacksons - Fleeming's mother - Fleeming's uncle John.
IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin,
claiming to come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap
Philip of St. Melans, are found reputably settled in the county of
Kent. Persons of strong genealogical pinion pass from William
Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, to his contemporary 'John
Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver General of the County,' and
thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the proper summit of any
Cambrian pedigree - a prince; 'Guaith Voeth, Lord of Cardigan,' the
name and style of him. It may suffice, however, for the present,
that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and
grew to wealth and consequence in their new home.
Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only
was William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in
1555, but no less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century
and a half, a Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the
same place of humble honour. Of their wealth we know that in the
reign of Charles I., Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once
in the market buying land, and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor
of Stowting Court. This was an estate of some 320 acres, six miles
from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe
of Shipway, held of the Crown IN CAPITE by the service of six men
and a constable to defend the passage of the sea at Sandgate. It
had a chequered history before it fell into the hands of Thomas of
Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to another - to the
Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys, Trivets,
Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes: a
piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no
man's home. But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the
Jenkin family in Kent; and though passed on from brother to
brother, held in shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by
debts and jointures, and at least once sold and bought in again, it
remains to this day in the hands of the direct line. It is not my
design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to give a history of
this obscure family. But this is an age when genealogy has taken a
new lease of life, and become for the first time a human science;
so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to
trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we
study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton.
Not only do our character and talents lie upon the anvil and
receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our
life's story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the
biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.
From this point of view I ask the reader's leave to begin this
notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with the accession of
his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.
This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
'Westward Ho!' was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been
long enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be
Kentish folk themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in
particular their connection is singularly involved. John and his
wife were each descended in the third degree from another Thomas
Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and brother to Accepted Frewen,
Archbishop of York. John's mother had married a Frewen for a
second husband. And the last complication was to be added by the
Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner, Vice-Admiral of
the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal cousin of
Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's wife,
and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs.
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin
began life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any
Frewen to any Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a
problem almost insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus
exercised in her immediate circle, was in her old age 'a great
genealogist of all Sussex families, and much consulted.' The names
Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem to have been interchangeable at
will; and yet Fate proceeds with such particularity that it was
perhaps on the point of name that the family was ruined.
The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant
and unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and
held the living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an
extreme example of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure
of a man; jovial and jocular; fond of his garden, which produced
under his care the finest fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all
the family, very choice in horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu,
furiously. His saddle horse, Captain (for the names of horses are
piously preserved in the family chronicle which I follow), was
trained to break into a gallop as soon as the vicar's foot was
thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in the nine
miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door. Debt was the man's
proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his
church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy. At
an early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by
her he had two daughters and one son. One of the daughters died
unmarried; the other imitated her father, and married
'imprudently.' The son, still more gallantly continuing the
tradition, entered the army, loaded himself with debt, was forced
to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was lost on the Dogger
Bank in the war-ship MINOTAUR. If he did not marry below him, like
his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle William, it was
perhaps because he never married at all.
The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post-
Office, followed in all material points the example of Stephen,
married 'not very creditably,' and spent all the money he could lay
his hands on. He died without issue; as did the fourth brother,
John, who was of weak intellect and feeble health, and the fifth
brother, William, whose brief career as one of Mrs. Buckner's
satellites will fall to be considered later on. So soon, then, as
the MINOTAUR had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting and the line
of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third brother,
Charles.
Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to
judge by these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and
their defect; but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional
beauty and sweetness both of face and disposition, the family fault
had quite grown to be a virtue, and we find him in consequence the
drudge and milk-cow of his relatives. Born in 1766, Charles served
at sea in his youth, and smelt both salt water and powder. The
Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as I can make out, to the
land service. Stephen's son had been a soldier; William (fourth of
Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy Braddock's in America,
where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an estate on the
James River, called, after the parental seat; of which I should
like well to hear if it still bears the name. It was probably by
the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family
by his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the
direction of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the
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 practice on a large scale; and
we find him married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the
daughter of a London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was
still alive, galloping about the country or skulking in his
chancel. It does not appear whether he let or sold the paternal
manor to Charles; one or other, it must have been; and the sailor-
farmer settled at Stowting, with his wife, his mother, his
unmarried sister, and his sick brother John. Out of the six people
of whom his nearest family consisted, three were in his own house,
and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas) he appears
to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom. He
hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and
Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. 'Lord Rokeby, his
neighbour, called him kinsman,' writes my artless chronicler, 'and
altogether life was very cheery.' At Stowting his three sons,
John, Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna,
were all born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is
through the report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has
been looking on at these confused passages of family history.
In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the
work of a fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a
sister of Mrs. John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles
Frewen, clerk to the Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher
of the Black Rod, and secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied
issue in both beds, and being very rich - she died worth about
60,000L., mostly in land - she was in perpetual quest of an heir.
The mirage of this fortune hung before successive members of the
Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it dissolved and left
the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy. The grandniece,
Stephen's daughter, the one who had not 'married imprudently,'
appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by the
golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792. Next she
adopted William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad
with her - it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up
with him in Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor,
and got him a place in the King's Body-Guard, where he attracted
the notice of George III. by his proficiency in German. In 1797,
being on guard at St. James's Palace, William took a cold which
carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more left heirless.
Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a kindness
for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by the good looks and the
good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon
Charles Jenkin. He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to
be the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of family farming.
Mrs. Jenkin, the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs.
Buckner, 570, some at Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one-
half of Stowting to a tenant, and threw the other and various
scattered parcels into the common enterprise; so that the whole
farm amounted to near upon a thousand acres, and was scattered over
thirty miles of country. The ex-seaman of thirty-nine, on whose
wisdom and ubiquity the scheme depended, was to live in the
meanwhile without care or fear. He was to check himself in
nothing; his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless
brothers, were to be indulged in comfort; and whether the year
quite paid itself or not, whether successive years left accumulated
savings or only a growing deficit, the fortune of the golden aunt
should in the end repair all.
On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to
Church House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three,
among the number. Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of
the life that followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up
from Windsor in a coach and six, two post-horses and their own
four; of the house full of visitors, the great roasts at the fire,
the tables in the servants' hall laid for thirty or forty for a
month together; of the daily press of neighbours, many of whom,
Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and Dynes, were also
kinsfolk; and the parties 'under the great spreading chestnuts of
the old fore court,' where the young people danced and made merry
to the music of the village band. Or perhaps, in the depth of
winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they
would ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the
snow to the pony's saddle girths, and be received by the tenants
like princes.
This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and
goings of the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of
the lads. John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, 'loud and
notorious with his whip and spurs,' settled down into a kind of
Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the shoes of his father and his aunt.
Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is briefly dismissed as 'a handsome
beau'; but he had the merit or the good fortune to become a doctor
of medicine, so that when the crash came he was not empty-handed
for the war of life. Charles, at the day-school of Northiam, grew
so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became matter
of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner. Hereupon
that tall, rough-voiced, formidable uncle entered with the lad into
a covenant: every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the
Admiral a penny; everyday that he escaped, the process was to be
reversed. 'I recollect,' writes Charles, 'going crying to my
mother to be taken to the Admiral to pay my debt.' It would seem
by these terms the speculation was a losing one; yet it is probable
it paid indirectly by bringing the boy under remark. The Admiral
was no enemy to dunces; he loved courage, and Charles, while yet
little more than a baby, would ride the great horse into the pond.
Presently it was decided that here was the stuff of a fine sailor;
and at an early period the name of Charles Jenkin was entered on a
ship's books.
From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye,
where the master took 'infinite delight' in strapping him. 'It
keeps me warm and makes you grow,' he used to say. And the stripes
were not altogether wasted, for the dunce, though still very 'raw,'
made progress with his studies. It was known, moreover, that he
was going to sea, always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys;
and in his case the glory was not altogether future, it wore a
present form when he came driving to Rye behind four horses in the
same carriage with an admiral. 'I was not a little proud, you may
believe,' says he.
In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his
father to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace. The Bishop had heard
from his brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well,
and had an order from Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the
Royal Naval College at Portsmouth. Both the Bishop and the Admiral
patted him on the head and said, 'Charles will restore the old
family'; by which I gather with some surprise that, even in these
days of open house at Northiam and golden hope of my aunt's
fortune, the family was supposed to stand in need of restoration.
But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all to
those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and
Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.
What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in
which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their
gaiety and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a
widow) at Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at
Lord Melville's and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he
began to have 'bumptious notions,' and his head was 'somewhat
turned with fine people'; as to some extent it remained throughout
his innocent and honourable life.
In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the CONQUEROR,
Captain Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The captain had
earned this name by his style of discipline, which would have
figured well in the pages of Marryat: 'Put the prisoner's head in
a bag and give him another dozen!' survives as a specimen of his
commands; and the men were often punished twice or thrice in a
week. On board the ship of this disciplinarian, Charles and his
father were carried in a billy-boat from Sheerness in December,
1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his pretensions, a
twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which were ordered
into the care of the gunner. 'The old clerks and mates,' he
writes, 'used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-
boat, and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old
Kentish smuggler. This to my pride, you will believe, was not a
little offensive.'
THE CONQUEROR carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding
at the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in
July, 1817, she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm.
Thus it befel that Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of
the French wars, played a small part in the dreary and disgraceful
afterpiece of St. Helena. Life on the guard-ship was onerous and
irksome. The anchor was never lifted, sail never made, the great
guns were silent; none was allowed on shore except on duty; all day
the movements of the imperial captive were signalled to and fro;
all night the boats rowed guard around the accessible portions of
the coast. This prolonged stagnation and petty watchfulness in
what Napoleon himself called that 'unchristian' climate, told
cruelly on the health of the ship's company. In eighteen months,
according to O'Meara, the CONQUEROR had lost one hundred and ten
men and invalided home one hundred and seven, being more than a
third of her complement. It does not seem that our young
midshipman so much as once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other
ways Jenkin was more fortunate than some of his comrades. He drew
in water-colour; not so badly as his father, yet ill enough; and
this art was so rare aboard the CONQUEROR that even his humble
proficiency marked him out and procured him some alleviations.
Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and here he
had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the historic
house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a strange
notion of the arts in our old English Navy. Yet it was again as an
artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for
a second outing in a ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six
weeks to windward of the island undertaken by the CONQUEROR herself
in quest of health, were the only breaks in three years of
murderous inaction; and at the end of that period Jenkin was
invalided home, having 'lost his health entirely.'
As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his
career came to an end. For forty-two years he continued to serve
his country obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for
inconspicuous and honourable services, but denied any opportunity
of serious distinction. He was first two years in the LARNE,
Captain Tait, hunting pirates and keeping a watch on the Turkish
and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago. Captain Tait was a
favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the Ionian
Islands - King Tom as he was called - who frequently took passage
in the LARNE. King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean, and
was a terror to the officers of the watch. He would come on deck
at night; and with his broad Scotch accent, 'Well, sir,' he would
say, 'what depth of water have ye? Well now, sound; and ye'll just
find so or so many fathoms,' as the case might be; and the
obnoxious passenger was generally right. On one occasion, as the
ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas came up the hatchway and cast
his eyes towards the gallows. 'Bangham' - Charles Jenkin heard him
say to his aide-de-camp, Lord Bangham - 'where the devil is that
other chap? I left four fellows hanging there; now I can only see
three. Mind there is another there to-morrow.' And sure enough
there was another Greek dangling the next day. 'Captain Hamilton,
of the CAMBRIAN, kept the Greeks in order afloat,' writes my
author, 'and King Tom ashore.'
From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities
was in the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844,
now as a subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out
pirates, 'then very notorious' in the Leeward Islands, cruising
after slavers, or carrying dollars and provisions for the
Government. While yet a midshipman, he accompanied Mr. Cockburn to
Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar. In the brigantine GRIFFON,
which he commanded in his last years in the West Indies, he carried
aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice earned the thanks
of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to extort,
under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money due
to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in
San Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous
imprisonment and the recovery of a 'chest of money' of which they
had been robbed. Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of
public censure. This was in 1837, when he commanded the ROMNEY
lying in the inner harbour of Havannah. The ROMNEY was in no
proper sense a man-of-war; she was a slave-hulk, the bonded
warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where negroes, captured
out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained provisionally,
till the Commission should decide upon their case and either set
them free or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship, already an
eye-sore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape. The
position was invidious; on one side were the tradition of the
British flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the
other, the certainty that if the slave were kept, the ROMNEY would
be ordered at once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed
Commission compromised. Without consultation with any other
officer, Captain Jenkin (then lieutenant) returned the man to shore
and took the Captain-General's receipt. Lord Palmerston approved
his course; but the zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never
to be named without respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-
nine years later, the matter was again canvassed in Parliament, and
Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin defended by Admiral Erskine in a
letter to the TIMES (March 13, 1876).
In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral
Pigot's flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some
thirty pennants; and about the same time, closed his career by an
act of personal bravery. He had proceeded with his boats to the
help of a merchant vessel, whose cargo of combustibles had taken
fire and was smouldering under hatches; his sailors were in the
hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and Jenkin was on deck
directing operations, when he found his orders were no longer
answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and slung
up several insensible men with his own hand. For this act, he
received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a
sense of his gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted
Commander, superseded, and could never again obtain employment.
In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell Jackson, who introduced him to
his family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson,
Custos Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to
be originally Scotch; and on the mother's side, counted kinship
with some of the Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of
the Campbells of Auchenbreck. Her father Colin, a merchant in
Greenock, is said to have been the heir to both the estate and the
baronetcy; he claimed neither, which casts a doubt upon the fact,
but he had pride enough himself, and taught enough pride to his
family, for any station or descent in Christendom. He had four
daughters. One married an Edinburgh writer, as I have it on a
first account - a minister, according to another - a man at least
of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of
Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded. Another
married an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the
tale) she had seen acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps
be regarded rather as a measure of the family annoyance, than a
mirror of the facts. The marriage was not in itself unhappy;
Adcock was a gentleman by birth and made a good husband; the family
reasonably prospered, and one of the daughters married no less a
man than Clarkson Stanfield. But by the father, and the two
remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions and a truly
Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented. For long the
sisters lived estranged then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock were
reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the
name of Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her
sister's lips, until the morning when she announced: 'Mary Adcock
is dead; I saw her in her shroud last night.' Second sight was
hereditary in the house; and sure enough, as I have it reported, on
that very night Mrs. Adcock had passed away. Thus, of the four
daughters, two had, according to the idiotic notions of their
friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the others supported the
honour of the family with a better grace, and married West Indian
magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never heard and would
not care to hear: So strange a thing is this hereditary pride. Of
Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's grandfather, I
know naught. His wife, as I have said, was a woman of fierce
passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them
with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons,
was a mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane
violence of temper. She had three sons and one daughter. Two of
the sons went utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty.
The third went to India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly
from the knowledge of his relatives that he was thought to be long
dead. Years later, when his sister was living in Genoa, a red-
bearded man of great strength and stature, tanned by years in
India, and his hands covered with barbaric gems, entered the room
unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted her from her
seat, and kissed her. It was her brother, suddenly returned out of
a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of
general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and
next his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he
had mixed blood.
The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla,
became the wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the
subject of this notice, Fleeming Jenkin. She was a woman of parts
and courage. Not beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of
seeming so; played the part of a belle in society, while far
lovelier women were left unattended; and up to old age had much of
both the exigency and the charm that mark that character. She drew
naturally, for she had no training, with unusual skill; and it was
from her, and not from the two naval artists, that Fleeming
inherited his eye and hand. She played on the harp and sang with
something beyond the talent of an amateur. At the age of
seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of youthful
enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without
introduction, found her way into the presence of the PRIMA DONNA
and begged for lessons. Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she
had done, and though she refused to be her mistress, placed her in
the hands of a friend. Nor was this all, for when Pasta returned
to Paris, she sent for the girl (once at least) to test her
progress. But Mrs. Jenkin's talents were not so remarkable as her
fortitude and strength of will; and it was in an art for which she
had no natural taste (the art of literature) that she appeared
before the public. Her novels, though they attained and merited a
certain popularity both in France and England, are a measure only
of her courage. They were a task, not a beloved task; they were
written for money in days of poverty, and they served their end.
In the least thing as well as in the greatest, in every province of
life as well as in her novels, she displayed the same capacity of
taking infinite pains, which descended to her son. When she was
about forty (as near as her age was known) she lost her voice; set
herself at once to learn the piano, working eight hours a day; and
attained to such proficiency that her collaboration in chamber
music was courted by professionals. And more than twenty years
later, the old lady might have been seen dauntlessly beginning the
study of Hebrew. This is the more ethereal part of courage; nor
was she wanting in the more material. Once when a neighbouring
groom, a married man, had seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin mounted her
horse, rode over to the stable entrance and horsewhipped the man
with her own hand.
How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and
the young midshipman, is not very I easy to conceive. Charles
Jenkin was one of the finest creatures breathing; loyalty,
devotion, simple natural piety, boyish cheerfulness, tender and
manly sentiment in the old sailor fashion, were in him inherent and
inextinguishable either by age, suffering, or injustice. He
looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman; he must have been
everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for his face and
his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you would have
said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that, to
this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But though
he was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to
the end no genius. Upon all points that a man must understand to
be a gentleman, to be upright, gallant, affectionate and dead to
self, Captain Jenkin was more knowing than one among a thousand;
outside of that, his mind was very largely blank. He had indeed a
simplicity that came near to vacancy; and in the first forty years
of his married life, this want grew more accentuated. In both
families imprudent marriages had been the rule; but neither Jenkin
nor Campbell had ever entered into a more unequal union. It was
the captain's good looks, we may suppose, that gained for him this
elevation; and in some ways and for many years of his life, he had
to pay the penalty. His wife, impatient of his incapacity and
surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain contempt.
She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his; after his
retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor captain, who
could never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner
mumchance; and even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did
not recognise for long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay
buried in the heart of his father. Yet it would be an error to
regard this marriage as unfortunate. It not only lasted long
enough to justify itself in a beautiful and touching epilogue, but
it gave to the world the scientific work and what (while time was)
were of far greater value, the delightful qualities of Fleeming
Jenkin. The Kentish-Welsh family, facile, extravagant, generous to
a fault and far from brilliant, had given the father, an extreme
example of its humble virtues. On the other side, the wild, cruel,
proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scotch Campbell-
Jacksons, had put forth, in the person of the mother all its force
and courage.
The marriage fell in evil days. In 1823, the bubble of the Golden
Aunt's inheritance had burst. She died holding the hand of the
nephew she had so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down
and seemed to bless him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for
when the will was opened, there was not found so much as the
mention of his name. He was deeply in debt; in debt even to the
estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell a piece of land to
clear himself. 'My dear boy,' he said to Charles, 'there will be
nothing left for you. I am a ruined man.' And here follows for me
the strangest part of this story. From the death of the
treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin, senior, had still some nine years
to live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and
perhaps his affairs were past restoration. But his family at least
had all this while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew
what they had to look for at their father's death; and yet when
that happened in September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically
waiting. Poor John, the days of his whips and spurs, and Yeomanry
dinners, were quite over; and with that incredible softness of the
Jenkin nature, he settled down for the rest of a long life, into
something not far removed above a peasant. The mill farm at
Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and here he built himself
a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends meet with
rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road and
not at all abashed at his employment. In dress, voice, and manner,
he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least care
for appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment
with the present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic
cheerfulness, announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was
yet well pleased to go. One would think there was little active
virtue to be inherited from such a race; and yet in this same
voluntary peasant, the special gift of Fleeming Jenkin was already
half developed. The old man to the end was perpetually inventing;
his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated correspondence is full (when
he does not drop into cookery receipts) of pumps, road engines,
steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam-threshing machines; and I
have it on Fleeming's word that what he did was full of ingenuity -
only, as if by some cross destiny, useless. These disappointments
he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but rejoiced with
a particular relish over his nephew's success in the same field.
'I glory in the professor,' he wrote to his brother; and to
Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, 'I was much
pleased with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with
Conisure's' (connoisseur's, QUASI amateur's) 'engineering? Oh,
what presumption! - either of you or 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
life-long war in his members had begun thus early by a victory for
what was best.
We can trace the family from one country place to another in the
south of Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by
riding home the pony from the moors. Before he was nine he could
write such a passage as this about a Hallowe'en observance: 'I
pulled a middling-sized cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold
about it. No witches would run after me when I was sowing my
hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away together very comfortably
to the end of their lives, and when mamma put hers in which were
meant for herself and papa they blazed away in the like manner.'
Before he was ten he could write, with a really irritating
precocity, that he had been 'making some pictures from a book
called "Les Francais peints par euxmemes." . . . It is full of
pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The
pictures are a little caricatured, but not much.' Doubtless this
was only an echo from his mother, but it shows the atmosphere in
which he breathed. It must have been a good change for this art
critic to be the playmate of Mary Macdonald, their gardener's
daughter at Barjarg, and to sup with her family on potatoes and
milk; and Fleeming himself attached some value to this early and
friendly experience of another class.
His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh. Thence he
went to the Edinburgh Academy, where he was the classmate of Tait
and Clerk Maxwell, bore away many prizes, and was once unjustly
flogged by Rector Williams. He used to insist that all his bad
schoolfellows had died early, a belief amusingly characteristic of
the man's consistent optimism. In 1846 the mother and son
proceeded to Frankfort-on-the-Main, where they were soon joined by
the father, now reduced to inaction and to play something like
third fiddle in his narrow household. The emancipation of the
slaves had deprived them of their last resource beyond the half-pay
of a captain; and life abroad was not only desirable for the sake
of Fleeming's education, it was almost enforced by reasons of
economy. But it was, no doubt, somewhat hard upon the captain.
Certainly that perennial boy found a companion in his son; they
were both active and eager, both willing to be amused, both young,
if not in years, then in character. They went out together on
excursions and sketched old castles, sitting side by side; they had
an angry rivalry in walking, doubtless equally sincere upon both
sides; and indeed we may say that Fleeming was exceptionally
favoured, and that no boy had ever a companion more innocent,
engaging, gay, and airy. But although in this case it would be
easy to exaggerate its import, yet, in the Jenkin family also, the
tragedy of the generations was proceeding, and the child was
growing out of his father's knowledge. His artistic aptitude was
of a different order. Already he had his quick sight of many sides
of life; he already overflowed with distinctions and
generalisations, contrasting the dramatic art and national
character of England, Germany, Italy, and France. If he were dull,
he would write stories and poems. 'I have written,' he says at
thirteen, 'a very long story in heroic measure, 300 lines, and
another Scotch story and innumerable bits of poetry'; and at the
same age he had not only a keen feeling for scenery, but could do
something with his pen to call it up. I feel I do always less than
justice to the delightful memory of Captain Jenkin; but with a lad
of this character, cutting the teeth of his intelligence, he was
sure to fall into the background.
The family removed in 1847 to Paris, where Fleeming was put to
school under one Deluc. There he learned French, and (if the
captain is right) first began to show a taste for mathematics. But
a far more important teacher than Deluc was at hand; the year 1848,
so momentous for Europe, was momentous also for Fleeming's
character. The family politics were Liberal; Mrs. Jenkin, generous
before all things, was sure to be upon the side of exiles; and in
the house of a Paris friend of hers, Mrs. Turner - already known to
fame as Shelley's Cornelia de Boinville - Fleeming saw and heard
such men as Manin, Gioberti, and the Ruffinis. He was thus
prepared to sympathise with revolution; and when the hour came, and
he found himself in the midst of stirring and influential events,
the lad's whole character was moved. He corresponded at that time
with a young Edinburgh friend, one Frank Scott; and I am here going
to draw somewhat largely on this boyish correspondence. It gives
us at once a picture of the Revolution and a portrait of Jenkin at
fifteen; not so different (his friends will think) from the Jenkin
of the end - boyish, simple, opinionated, delighting in action,
delighting before all things in any generous sentiment.
'February 23, 1848.
'When at 7 o'clock to-day I went out, I met a large band going
round the streets, calling on the inhabitants to illuminate their
houses, and bearing torches. This was all very good fun, and
everybody was delighted; but as they stopped rather long and were
rather turbulent in the Place de la Madeleine, near where we live'
[in the Rue Caumartin] 'a squadron of dragoons came up, formed, and
charged at a hand-gallop. This was a very pretty sight; the crowd
was not too thick, so they easily got away; and the dragoons only
gave blows with the back of the sword, which hurt but did not
wound. I was as close to them as I am now to the other side of the
table; it was rather impressive, however. At the second charge
they rode on the pavement and knocked the torches out of the
fellows' hands; rather a shame, too - wouldn't be stood in England.
. . .
[At] 'ten minutes to ten . . . I went a long way along the
Boulevards, passing by the office of Foreign Affairs, where Guizot
lives, and where to-night there were about a thousand troops
protecting him from the fury of the populace. After this was
passed, the number of the people thickened, till about half a mile
further on, I met a troop of vagabonds, the wildest vagabonds in
the world - Paris vagabonds, well armed, having probably broken
into gunsmiths' shops and taken the guns and swords. They were
about a hundred. These were followed by about a thousand (I am
rather diminishing than exaggerating numbers all through),
indifferently armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc. An uncountable
troop of gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers' wives (Paris women dare
anything), ladies' maids, common women - in fact, a crowd of all
classes, though by far the greater number were of the better
dressed class - followed. Indeed, it was a splendid sight: the
mob in front chanting the "MARSEILLAISE," the national war hymn,
grave and powerful, sweetened by the night air - though night in
these splendid streets was turned into day, every window was filled
with lamps, dim torches were tossing in the crowd . . . for Guizot
has late this night given in his resignation, and this was an
improvised illumination.
'I and my father had turned with the crowd, and were close behind
the second troop of vagabonds. Joy was on every face. I remarked
to papa that "I would not have missed the scene for anything, I
might never see such a splendid one," when PLONG went one shot -
every face went pale - R-R-R-R-R went the whole detachment, [and]
the whole crowd of gentlemen and ladies turned and cut. Such a
scene! - ladies, gentlemen, and vagabonds went sprawling in the
mud, not shot but tripped up; and those that went down could not
rise, they were trampled over. . . . I ran a short time straight on
and did not fall, then turned down a side street, ran fifty yards
and felt tolerably safe; looked for papa, did not see him; so
walked on quickly, giving the news as I went.' [It appears, from
another letter, the boy was the first to carry word of the firing
to the Rue St. 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. . . . Tonight I have given you what I have
seen with my own eyes an hour ago, and began trembling with
excitement and fear. If I have been too long on this one subject,
it is because it is yet before my eyes.
'Monday, 24.
'It was that fire raised the people. There was fighting all
through the night in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, on the
Boulevards where they had been shot at, and at the Porte St. Denis.
At ten o'clock, they resigned the house of the Minister of Foreign
Affairs (where the disastrous volley was fired) to the people, who
immediately took possession of it. I went to school, but [was]
hardly there when the row in that quarter commenced. Barricades
began to be fixed. Everyone was very grave now; the EXTERNES went
away, but no one came to fetch me, so I had to stay. No lessons
could go on. A troop of armed men took possession of the
barricades, so it was supposed I should have to sleep there. The
revolters came and asked for arms, but Deluc (head-master) is a
National Guard, and he said he had only his own and he wanted them;
but he said he would not fire on them. Then they asked for wine,
which he gave them. They took good care not to get drunk, knowing
they would not be able to fight. They were very polite and behaved
extremely well.
'About 12 o'clock a servant came for a boy who lived near me, [and]
Deluc thought it best to send me with him. We heard a good deal of
firing near, but did not come across any of the parties. As we
approached the railway, the barricades were no longer formed of
palings, planks, or stones; but they had got all the omnibuses as
they passed, sent the horses and passengers about their business,
and turned them over. A double row of overturned coaches made a
capital barricade, with a few paving stones.
'When I got home I found to my astonishment that in our fighting
quarter it was much quieter. Mamma had just been out seeing the
troops in the Place de la Concorde, when suddenly the Municipal
Guard, now fairly exasperated, prevented the National Guard from
proceeding, and fired at them; the National Guard had come with
their muskets not loaded, but at length returned the fire. Mamma
saw the National Guard fire. The Municipal Guard were round the
corner. She was delighted for she saw no person killed, though
many of the Municipals were. . . . .
'I immediately went out with my papa (mamma had just come back with
him) and went to the Place de la Concorde. There was an enormous
quantity of troops in the Place. Suddenly the gates of the gardens
of the Tuileries opened: we rushed forward, out gallopped an
enormous number of cuirassiers, in the middle of which were a
couple of low carriages, said first to contain the Count de Paris
and the Duchess of Orleans, but afterwards they said it was the
King and Queen; and then I heard he had abdicated. I returned and
gave the news.
'Went out again up the Boulevards. The house of the Minister of
Foreign Affairs was filled with people and "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 were
very unquiet, filled with armed men and women, for the troops had
followed the ex-King to Neuilly and left Paris in the power of the
people. We met the captain of the Third Legion of the National
Guard (who had principally protected the people), badly wounded by
a Municipal Guard, stretched on a litter. He was in possession of
his senses. He was surrounded by a troop of men crying "Our brave
captain - we have him yet - he's not dead! VIVE LA 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 cartridges
to testify their joy, and they had a cannon on the top of the
palace. It was a sight to see a palace sacked and armed vagabonds
firing out of the windows, and throwing shirts, papers, and dresses
of all kinds out of the windows. They are not rogues, these
French; they are not stealing, burning, or doing much harm. In the
Tuileries they have dressed up some of the statues, broken some,
and stolen nothing but queer dresses. I say, Frank, you must not
hate the French; hate the Germans if you like. The French laugh at
us a little, and call out GODDAM in the streets; but to-day, in
civil war, when they might have put a bullet through our heads, I
never was insulted once.
'At present we have a provisional Government, consisting of Odion
[SIC] Barrot, Lamartine, Marast, and some others; among them a
common workman, but very intelligent. This is a triumph of liberty
- rather!
'Now then, Frank, what do you think of it? I in a revolution and
out all day. Just think, what fun! So it was at first, till I was
fired at yesterday; but to-day I was not frightened, but it turned
me sick at heart, I don't know why. There has been no great
bloodshed, [though] I certainly have seen men's blood several
times. But there's something shocking to see a whole armed
populace, though not furious, for not one single shop has been
broken open, except the gunsmiths' shops, and most of the arms will
probably be taken back again. For the French have no cupidity in
their nature; they don't like to steal - it is not in their nature.
I shall send this letter in a day or two, when I am sure the post
will go again. I know I have been a long time writing, but I hope
you will find the matter of this letter interesting, as coming from
a person resident on the spot; though probably you don't take much
interest in the French, but I can think, write, and speak on no
other subject.
'Feb. 25.
'There is no more fighting, the people have conquered; but the
barricades are still kept up, and the people are in arms, more than
ever fearing some new act of treachery on the part of the ex-King.
The fight where I was was the principal cause of the Revolution. I
was in little danger from the shot, for there was an immense crowd
in front of me, though quite within gunshot. [By another letter, a
hundred yards from the troops.] I wished I had stopped there.
'The Paris streets are filled with the most extraordinary crowds of
men, women and children, ladies and gentlemen. Every person
joyful. The bands of armed men are perfectly polite. Mamma and
aunt to-day walked through armed crowds alone, that were firing
blank cartridges in all directions. Every person made way with the
greatest politeness, and one common man with a blouse, coming by
accident against her immediately stopped to beg her pardon in the
politest manner. There are few drunken men. The Tuileries is
still being run over by the people; they only broke two things, a
bust of Louis Philippe and one of Marshal Bugeaud, who fired on the
people. . . . .
'I have been out all day again to-day, and precious tired I am.
The Republican party seem the strongest, and are going about with
red ribbons in their button-holes. . . . .
'The title of "Mister" is abandoned; they say nothing but
"Citizen," and the people are shaking hands amazingly. They have
got to the top of the public monuments, and, mingling with bronze
or stone statues, five or six make a sort of TABLEAU VIVANT, the
top man holding up the red flag of the Republic; and right well
they do it, and very picturesque they look. I think I shall put
this letter in the post to-morrow as we got a letter to-night.
(On Envelope.)
'M. Lamartine has now by his eloquence conquered the whole armed
crowd of citizens threatening to kill him if he did not immediately
proclaim the Republic and red flag. He said he could not yield to
the citizens of Paris alone, that the whole country must be
consulted; that he chose the tricolour, for it had followed and
accompanied the triumphs of France all over the world, and that the
red flag had only been dipped in the blood of the citizens. For
sixty hours he has been quieting the people: he is at the head of
everything. Don't be prejudiced, Frank, by what you see in the
papers. The French have acted nobly, splendidly; there has been no
brutality, plundering, or stealing. . . . I did not like the
French before; but in this respect they are the finest people in
the world. I am so glad to have been here.'
And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty
and order read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the
reader knows, it was but the first act of the piece. The letters,
vivid as they are, written as they were by a hand trembling with
fear and excitement, yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone,
to the profound effect produced. At the sound of these songs and
shot of cannon, the boy's mind awoke. He dated his own
appreciation of the art of acting from the day when he saw and
heard Rachel recite the 'MARSEILLAISE' at the Francais, the
tricolour in her arms. What is still more strange, he had been up
to then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not
distinguish 'God save the Queen' from 'Bonnie Dundee'; and now, to
the chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and
singing 'MOURIR POUR LA PATRIE.' But the letters, though they
prepare the mind for no such revolution in the boy's tastes and
feelings, are yet full of entertaining traits. Let the reader note
Fleeming's eagerness to influence his friend Frank, an incipient
Tory (no less) as further history displayed; his unconscious
indifference to his father and devotion to his mother, betrayed in
so many significant expressions and omissions; the sense of dignity
of this diminutive 'person resident on the spot,' who was so happy
as to escape insult; and the strange picture of the household -
father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna - all day in the
streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off
alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the
massacre.
They had all the gift of enjoying life's texture as it comes; they
were all born optimists. The name of liberty was honoured in that
family, its spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of
the foreign friends of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men
distinguished on the Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, they beheld
France standing on the top of golden hours
And human nature seeming born again.
At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their
element in such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in
its course, moderate in its purpose. For them,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.
And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth)
they should have so specially disliked the consequence.
It came upon them by surprise. Liberal friends of the precise
right shade of colour had assured them, in Mrs. Turner's drawing-
room, that all was for the best; and they rose on January 23
without fear. About the middle of the day they heard the sound of
musketry, and the next morning they were wakened by the cannonade.
The French who had behaved so 'splendidly,' pausing, at the voice
of Lamartine, just where judicious Liberals could have desired -
the French, who had 'no cupidity in their nature,' were now about
to play a variation on the theme rebellion. The Jenkins took
refuge in the house of Mrs. Turner, the house of the false
prophets, 'Anna going with Mrs. Turner, that she might be prevented
speaking English, Fleeming, Miss H. and I (it is the mother who
writes) walking together. As we reached the Rue de Clichy, the
report of the cannon sounded close to our ears and made our hearts
sick, I assure you. The fighting was at the barrier Rochechouart,
a few streets off. All Saturday and Sunday we were a prey to great
alarm, there came so many reports that the insurgents were getting
the upper hand. One could tell the state of affairs from the
extreme quiet or the sudden hum in the street. When the news was
bad, all the houses closed and the people disappeared; when better,
the doors half opened and you heard the sound of men again. From
the upper windows we could see each discharge from the Bastille - I
mean the smoke rising - and also the flames and smoke from the
Boulevard la Chapelle. We were four ladies, and only Fleeming by
way of a man, and difficulty enough we had to keep him from joining
the National Guards - his pride and spirit were both fired. You
cannot picture to yourself the multitudes of soldiers, guards, and
armed men of all sorts we watched - not close to the window,
however, for such havoc had been made among them by the firing from
the windows, that as the battalions marched by, they cried, "Fermez
vos 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 their second
revolution.
The attack on Spirito Santo, and the capitulation and departure of
the troops speedily followed. Genoa was in the hands of the
Republicans, and now came a time when the English residents were in
a position to pay some return for hospitality received. Nor were
they backward. Our Consul (the same who had the benefit of
correction from Fleeming) carried the Intendente on board the
VENGEANCE, escorting him through the streets, getting along with
him on board a shore boat, and when the insurgents levelled their
muskets, standing up and naming himself, 'CONSOLE INGLESE.' A
friend of the Jenkins', Captain Glynne, had a more painful, if a
less dramatic part. One Colonel Nosozzo had been killed (I read)
while trying to prevent his own artillery from firing on the mob;
but in that hell's cauldron of a distracted city, there were no
distinctions made, and the Colonel's widow was hunted for her life.
In her grief and peril, the Glynnes received and hid her; Captain
Glynne sought and found her husband's body among the slain, saved
it for two days, brought the widow a lock of the dead man's hair;
but at last, the mob still strictly searching, seems to have
abandoned the body, and conveyed his guest on board the VENGEANCE.
The Jenkins also had their refugees, the family of an 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
electromagnetism; and it was principally in that subject that
Signor Flaminio, questioned in Latin and answering in Italian,
passed his Master of Arts degree with first-class honours. That he
had secured the notice of his teachers, one circumstance
sufficiently proves. A philosophical society was started under the
presidency of Mamiani, 'one of the examiners and one of the leaders
of the Moderate party'; and out of five promising students brought
forward by the professors to attend the sittings and present
essays, Signor Flaminio was one. I cannot find that he ever read
an essay; and indeed I think his hands were otherwise too full. He
found his fellow-students 'not such a bad set of chaps,' and
preferred the Piedmontese before the Genoese; but I suspect he
mixed not very freely with either. Not only were his days filled
with university work, but his spare hours were fully dedicated to
the arts under the eye of a beloved task-mistress. He worked hard
and well in the art school, where he obtained a silver medal 'for a
couple of legs the size of life drawn from one of Raphael's
cartoons.' His holidays were spent in sketching; his evenings,
when they were free, at the theatre. Here at the opera he
discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art of music; and it
was, he wrote, 'as if he had found out a heaven on earth.' 'I am
so anxious that whatever he professes to know, he should really
perfectly possess,' his mother wrote, 'that I spare no pains';
neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he
begged to be allowed to learn the piano, she started him with
characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence
'heart-rending groans' and saw 'anguished claspings of hands' as he
lost his way among their arid intricacies.
In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is something, for
the period, girlish. He was indeed his mother's boy; and it was
fortunate his mother was not altogether feminine. She gave her son
a womanly delicacy in morals, to a man's taste - to his own taste
in later life - too finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than
healthful. She encouraged him besides in drawing-room interests.
But in other points her influence was manlike. Filled with the
spirit of thoroughness, she taught him to make of the least of
these accomplishments a virile task; and the teaching lasted him
through life. Immersed as she was in the day's movements and
buzzed about by leading Liberals, she handed on to him her creed in
politics: an enduring kindness for Italy, and a loyalty, like that
of many clever women, to the Liberal party with but small regard to
men or measures. This attitude of mind used often to disappoint me
in a man so fond of logic; but I see now how it was learned from
the bright eyes of his mother and to the sound of the cannonades of
1848. To some of her defects, besides, she made him heir. Kind as
was the bond that united her to her son, kind and even pretty, she
was scarce a woman to adorn a home; loving as she did to shine;
careless as she was of domestic, studious of public graces. She
probably rejoiced to see the boy grow up in somewhat of the image
of herself, generous, excessive, enthusiastic, external; catching
at ideas, brandishing them when caught; fiery for the right, but
always fiery; ready at fifteen to correct a consul, ready at fifty
to explain to any artist his own art.
The defects and advantages of such a training were obvious in
Fleeming throughout life. His thoroughness was not that of the
patient scholar, but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate
study; he had learned too much from dogma, given indeed by
cherished lips; and precocious as he was in the use of the tools of
the mind, he was truly backward in knowledge of life and of
himself. Such as it was at least, his home and school training was
now complete; and you are to conceive the lad as being formed in a
household of meagre revenue, among foreign surroundings, and under
the influence of an imperious drawing-room queen; from whom he
learned a great refinement of morals, a strong sense of duty, much
forwardness of bearing, all manner of studious and artistic
interests, and many ready-made opinions which he embraced with a
son's and a disciple's loyalty.
CHAPTER III. 1851-1858.
Return to England - Fleeming at Fairbairn's - Experience in a
Strike - Dr. Bell and Greek Architecture - The Gaskells - Fleeming
at Greenwich - The Austins - Fleeming and the Austins - His
Engagement - Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson.
IN 1851, the year of Aunt Anna's death, the family left Genoa and
came to Manchester, where Fleeming was entered in Fairbairn's works
as an apprentice. From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue
Mediterranean, the humming lanes and the bright theatres of Genoa,
he fell - and he was sharply conscious of the fall - to the dim
skies and the foul ways of Manchester. England he found on his
return 'a horrid place,' and there is no doubt the family found it
a dear one. The story of the Jenkin finances is not easy to
follow. The family, I am told, did not practice frugality, only
lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who was always
complaining of 'those dreadful bills,' was 'always a good deal
dressed.' But at this time of the return to England, things must
have gone further. A holiday tour of a fortnight, Fleeming feared
would be beyond what he could afford, and he only projected it 'to
have a castle in the air.' And there were actual pinches. Fresh
from a warmer sun, he was obliged to go without a greatcoat, and
learned on railway journeys to supply the place of one with
wrappings of old newspaper.
From half-past eight till six, he must 'file and chip vigorously in
a moleskin suit and infernally dirty.' The work was not new to
him, for he had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to
Fleeming no work was without interest. Whatever a man can do or
know, he longed to know and do also. 'I never learned anything,'
he wrote, 'not even standing on my head, but I found a use for it.'
In the spare hours of his first telegraph voyage, to give an
instance of his greed of knowledge, he meant 'to learn the whole
art of navigation, every rope in the ship and how to handle her on
any occasion'; and once when he was shown a young lady's holiday
collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, 'It showed me my eyes had
been idle.' Nor was his the case of the mere literary smatterer,
content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do and to
do well, was even a dearer ambition than to know. Anything done
well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him.
I remember him with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so
exactly fitted that, when one was driven home, the others started
from their places; the whole spirit of Japan, he told me, was
pictured in that box; that plain piece of carpentry was as much
inspired by the spirit of perfection as the happiest drawing or the
finest bronze; and he who could not enjoy it in the one was not
fully able to enjoy it in the others. Thus, too, he found in
Leonardo's engineering and anatomical drawings a perpetual feast;
and of the former he spoke even with emotion. Nothing indeed
annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to separate the fine arts
from the arts of handicraft; any definition or theory that failed
to bring these two together, according to him, had missed the
point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing
things well done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last
to deny that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all.
And on the other hand, a nail ill-driven, a joint ill-fitted, a
tracing clumsily done, anything to which a man had set his hand and
not set it aptly, moved him to shame and anger. With such a
character, he would feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There
would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided,
and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file,
as he had practiced scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but
resolute to learn.
And there was another spring of delight. For he was now moving
daily among those strange creations of man's brain, to some so
abhorrent, to him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron,
water, and fire are made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more
powerful than an elephant's, and now with a touch more precise and
dainty than a pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I
could never share with him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my
weakness. Once when I had proved, for the hundredth time, the
depth of this defect, he looked at me askance. 'And the best of
the joke,' said he, 'is that he thinks himself quite a poet.' For
to him the struggle of the engineer against brute forces and with
inert allies, was nobly poetic. Habit never dulled in him the
sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his profession.
Habit only sharpened his inventor's gusto in contrivance, in
triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to
brave and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant the great
results alone are admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in
particular, rather the infinite device and sleight of hand that
made them possible.
A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as
Fairbairn's, a pupil would never be popular unless he drank with
the workmen and imitated them in speech and manner. Fleeming, who
would do none of these things, they accepted as a friend and
companion; and this was the subject of remark in Manchester, where
some memory of it lingers till to-day. He thought it one of the
advantages of his profession to be brought into a close relation
with the working classes; and for the skilled artisan he had a
great esteem, liking his company, his virtues, and his taste in
some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well to regard them,
like a platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, on the other hand,
broad distinctions; and it was his profound sense of the difference
between one working man and another that led him to devote so much
time, in later days, to the furtherance of technical education. In
1852 he had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in
the excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom)
both would seem to have behaved. Beginning with a fair show of
justice on either side, the masters stultified their cause by
obstinate impolicy, and the men disgraced their order by acts of
outrage. 'On Wednesday last,' writes Fleeming, 'about three
thousand banded round Fairbairn's door at 6 o'clock: men, women,
and children, factory boys and girls, the lowest of the low in a
very low place. Orders came that no one was to leave the works;
but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious
hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my companions and
myself went out with the very first, and had the full benefit of
every possible groan and bad language.' But the police cleared a
lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape unhurt,
and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so
that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill
of expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob.
'I never before felt myself so decidedly somebody, instead of
nobody,' he wrote.
Outside as inside the works, he was 'pretty merry and well to do,'
zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-
kindness to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week
with Dr. Bell, 'working away at certain geometrical methods of
getting the Greek architectural proportions': a business after
Fleeming's heart, for he was never so pleased as when he could
marry his two devotions, art and science. This was besides, in all
likelihood, the beginning of that love and intimate appreciation of
things Greek, from the least to the greatest, from the AGAMEMMON
(perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to the details of Grecian
tailoring, which he used to express in his familiar phrase: 'The
Greeks were the boys.' Dr. Bell - the son of George Joseph, the
nephew of Sir Charles, and though he made less use of it than some,
a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race - had hit upon
the singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave the
proportions of the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's
direction, applied the same method to the other orders, and again
found the proportions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were
prepared; but the discovery was never given to the world, perhaps
because of the dissensions that arose between the authors. For Dr.
Bell believed that 'these intersections were in some way connected
with, or symbolical of, the antagonistic forces at work'; but his
pupil and helper, with characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside
this mysticism, and interpreted the discovery as 'a geometrical
method of dividing the spaces or (as might be said) of setting out
the work, purely empirical and in no way connected with any laws of
either force or beauty.' 'Many a hard and pleasant fight we had
over it,' wrote Jenkin, in later years; 'and impertinent as it may
seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the arguments of the
master.' I do not know about the antagonistic forces in the Doric
order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of these
affairs with Dr. Bell was still, like the corrector of Italian
consuls, 'a great child in everything but information.' At the
house of Colonel Cleather, he might be seen with a family of
children; and with these, there was no word of the Greek orders;
with these Fleeming was only an uproarious boy and an entertaining
draughtsman; so that his coming was the signal for the young people
to troop into the playroom, where sometimes the roof rang with
romping, and sometimes they gathered quietly about him as he amused
them with his pencil.
In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my
readers - that of the Gaskells, Fleeming was a frequent visitor.
To Mrs. Gaskell, he would often bring his new ideas, a process that
many of his later friends will understand and, in their own cases,
remember. With the girls, he had 'constant fierce wrangles,'
forcing them to reason out their thoughts and to explain their
prepossessions; and I hear from Miss Gaskell that they used to
wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his character into the
smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish devotion to his
parents. Of one of these wrangles, I have found a record most
characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his
doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite
right 'to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar or to steal a
knife to prevent a murder'; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish
loyalty to what is current, had rejected the heresy with
indignation. From such passages-at-arms, many retire mortified and
ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the house than he fell
into delighted admiration of the spirit of his adversaries. From
that it was but a step to ask himself 'what truth was sticking in
their heads'; for even the falsest form of words (in Fleeming's
life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as he could 'not
even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire what is
pretty in the ugly thing.' And before he sat down to write his
letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. 'I fancy the
true idea,' he wrote, 'is that you must never do yourself or anyone
else a moral injury - make any man a thief or a liar - for any
end'; quite a different thing, as he would have loved to point out,
from never stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not
always out of key with his audience. One whom he met in the same
house announced that she would never again be happy. 'What does
that signify?' cried Fleeming. 'We are not here to be happy, but
to be good.' And the words (as his hearer writes to me) became to
her a sort of motto during life.
From Fairbairn's and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway
survey in Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn's at Greenwich,
where he was engaged as draughtsman. There in 1856, we find him in
'a terribly busy state, finishing up engines for innumerable gun-
boats and steam frigates for the ensuing campaign.' From half-past
eight in the morning till nine or ten at night, he worked in a
crowded office among uncongenial comrades, 'saluted by chaff,
generally low personal and not witty,' pelted with oranges and
apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself
with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be as little
like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, 'across a
dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied
houses'; he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics,
to study by himself in such spare time as remained to him; and
there were several ladies, young and not so young, with whom he
liked to correspond. But not all of these could compensate for the
absence of that mother, who had made herself so large a figure in
his life, for sorry surroundings, unsuitable society, and work that
leaned to the mechanical. 'Sunday,' says he, 'I generally visit
some friends in town and seem to swim in clearer water, but the
dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get back. Luckily I am
fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.' It is a
question in my mind, if he could have long continued to stand it
without loss. 'We are not here to be happy, but to be good,' quoth
the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for
happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life besides
when apart from circumstances, few men are agreeable to their
neighbours and still fewer to themselves; and it was at this stage
that Fleeming had arrived, later than common and even worse
provided. The letter from which I have quoted is the last of his
correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last confidential letter
to one of his own sex. 'If you consider it rightly,' he wrote long
after, 'you will find the want of correspondence no such strange
want in men's friendships. There is, believe me, something noble
in the metal which does not rust though not burnished by daily
use.' It is well said; but the last letter to Frank Scott is
scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the writer has outgrown his
old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from
a busy youth of three and twenty, breathes of seventeen: the
sickening alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope IN
VACUO, the lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world
of egoism under which youth stands groaning, a voluntary Atlas.
With Fleeming this disease was never seemingly severe. The very
day before this (to me) distasteful letter, he had written to Miss
Bell of Manchester in a sweeter strain; I do not quote the one, I
quote the other; fair things are the best. 'I keep my own little
lodgings,' he writes, 'but come up every night to see mamma' (who
was then on a visit to London) 'if not kept too late at the works;
and have singing lessons once more, and sing "DONNE L'AMORE E
SCALTRO PARGO-LETTO"; and think and talk about you; and listen to
mamma's projects DE Stowting. Everything turns to gold at her
touch, she's a fairy and no mistake. We go on talking till I have
a picture in my head, and can hardly believe at the end that the
original is Stowting. Even you don't know half how good mamma is;
in other things too, which I must not mention. She teaches me how
it is not necessary to be very rich to do much good. I begin to
understand that mamma would find useful occupation and create
beauty at the bottom of a volcano. She has little weaknesses, but
is a real generous-hearted woman, which I suppose is the finest
thing in the world.' Though neither mother nor son could be called
beautiful, they make a pretty picture; the ugly, generous, ardent
woman weaving rainbow illusions; the ugly, clear-sighted, loving
son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours of pleasure, half-
beguiled, half-amused, wholly admiring, as he listens. But as he
goes home, and the fancy pictures fade, and Stowting is once more
burthened with debt, and the noisy companions and the long hours of
drudgery once more approach, no wonder if the dirty green seems all
the dirtier or if Atlas must resume his load.
But in healthy natures, this time of moral teething passes quickly
of itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh interests; and
already, in the letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of hope:
his friends in London, his love for his profession. The last might
have saved him; for he was ere long to pass into a new sphere,
where all his faculties were to be tried and exercised, and his
life to be filled with interest and effort. But it was not left to
engineering: another and more influential aim was to be set before
him. He must, in any case, have fallen in love; in any case, his
love would have ruled his life; and the question of choice was, for
the descendant of two such families, a thing of paramount
importance. Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as he
was, the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have
been led far astray. By one of those partialities that fill men at
once with gratitude and wonder, his choosing was directed well. Or
are we to say that by a man's choice in marriage, as by a crucial
merit, he deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may
discern: that a man but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his
help-mate; and he must in part deserve her, or the treasure is but
won for a moment to be lost. Fleeming chanced if you will (and
indeed all these opportunities are as 'random as blind man's buff')
upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he had the wit to know it,
the courage to wait and labour for his prize, and the tenderness
and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes precious. Upon
this point he has himself written well, as usual with fervent
optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase) with a truth sticking in
his head.
'Love,' he wrote, 'is not an intuition of the person most suitable
to us, most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers
and bears fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that
person would be small indeed; our intuition would often fail; the
blindness of love would then be fatal as it is proverbial. No,
love works differently, and in its blindness lies its strength.
Man and woman, each strongly desires to be loved, each opens to the
other that heart of ideal aspirations which they have often hid
till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the other, tries to
fulfil that ideal, each partially succeeds. The greater the love,
the greater the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more
durable, the more beautiful the effect. Meanwhile the blindness of
each to the other's defects enables the transformation to proceed
[unobserved,] so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it ever is,
and this I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred
in the person whom they loved. Do not fear, therefore. I do not
tell you that your friend will not change, but as I am sure that
her choice cannot be that of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure
the change will be a safe and a good one. Do not fear that
anything you love will vanish, he must love it too.'
Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a
letter from Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins. This was a family
certain to interest a thoughtful young man. Alfred, the youngest
and least known of the Austins, had been a beautiful golden-haired
child, petted and kept out of the way of both sport and study by a
partial mother. Bred an attorney, he had (like both his brothers)
changed his way of life, and was called to the bar when past
thirty. A Commission of Enquiry into the state of the poor in
Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his true talents;
and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at Worcester, next
at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato famine and the
Irish immigration of the 'forties, and finally in London, where he
again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He was
then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's
Office of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled
with perfect competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his
retirement, in 1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath. While
apprentice to a Norwich attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent
visitor in the house of Mr. Barron, a rallying place in those days
of intellectual society. Edward Barron, the son of a rich saddler
or leather merchant in the Borough, was a man typical of the time.
When he was a child, he had once been patted on the head in his
father's shop by no less a man than Samuel Johnson, as the Doctor
went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale; and the child was
true to this early consecration. 'A life of lettered ease spent in
provincial retirement,' it is thus that the biographer of that
remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the
phrase is equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The
pair were close friends, 'W. T. and a pipe render everything
agreeable,' writes Barron in his diary in 1823; and in 1833, after
Barron had moved to London and Taylor had tasted the first public
failure of his powers, the latter wrote: 'To my ever dearest Mr.
Barron say, if you please, that I miss him more than I regret him -
that I acquiesce in his retirement from Norwich, because I could
ill brook his observation of my increasing debility of mind.' This
chosen companion of William Taylor must himself have been no
ordinary man; and he was the friend besides of Borrow, whom I find
him helping in his Latin. But he had no desire for popular
distinction, lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield of
Enfield's SPEAKER, and devoted his time to the education of his
family, in a deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain
traits of stoicism, that would surprise a modern. From these
children we must single out his youngest daughter, Eliza, who
learned under his care to be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and
to suppress emotion without outward sign after the manner of the
Godwin school. This was the more notable, as the girl really
derived from the Enfields; whose high-flown romantic temper, I wish
I could find space to illustrate. She was but seven years old,
when Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her; and the
union thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the husband
and wife differed, and they did so on momentous subjects, they
differed with perfect temper and content; and in the conduct of
life, and in depth and durability of love, they were at one. Each
full of high spirits, each practised something of the same
repression: no sharp word was uttered in their house. The same
point of honour ruled them, a guest was sacred and stood within the
pale from criticism. It was a house, besides, of unusual
intellectual tension. Mrs. Austin remembered, in the early days of
the marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and Alfred,
marching to and fro, each with his hands behind his back, and
'reasoning high' till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they
would cheer their speculations with as many as fifteen cups of tea.
And though, before the date of Fleeming's visit, the brothers were
separated, Charles long ago retired from the world at Brandeston,
and John already near his end in the 'rambling old house' at
Weybridge, Alfred Austin and his wife were still a centre of much
intellectual society, and still, as indeed they remained until the
last, youthfully alert in mind. There was but one child of the
marriage, Anne, and she was herself something new for the eyes of
the young visitor; brought up, as she had been, like her mother
before her, to the standard of a man's acquirements. Only one art
had she been denied, she must not learn the violin - the thought
was too monstrous even for the Austins; and indeed it would seem as
if that tide of reform which we may date from the days of Mary
Wollstonecraft had in some degree even receded; for though Miss
Austin was suffered to learn Greek, the accomplishment was kept
secret like a piece of guilt. But whether this stealth was caused
by a backward movement in public thought since the time of Edward
Barron, or by the change from enlightened Norwich to barbarian
London, I have no means of judging.
When Fleeming presented his letter, he fell in love at first sight
with Mrs. Austin and the life, and atmosphere of the house. There
was in the society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to
the world, something gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity,
something unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that
could not fail to hit the fancy of this hot-brained boy. The
unbroken enamel of courtesy, the self-restraint, the dignified
kindness of these married folk, had besides a particular attraction
for their visitor. He could not but compare what he saw, with what
he knew of his mother and himself. Whatever virtues Fleeming
possessed, he could never count on being civil; whatever brave,
true-hearted qualities he was able to admire in Mrs. Jenkin,
mildness of demeanour was not one of them. And here he found per
sons who were the equals of his mother and himself in intellect and
width of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity of
disposition. Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he always loved
it. He went away from that house struck through with admiration,
and vowing to himself that his own married life should be upon that
pattern, his wife (whoever she might be) like Eliza Barron, himself
such another husband as Alfred Austin. What is more strange, he
not only brought away, but left behind him, golden opinions. He
must have been - he was, I am told - a trying lad; but there shone
out of him such a light of innocent candour, enthusiasm,
intelligence, and appreciation, that to persons already some way
forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently the perennial
comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful. By a pleasant
coincidence, there was one person in the house whom he did not
appreciate and who did not appreciate him: Anne Austin, his future
wife. His boyish vanity ruffled her; his appearance, never
impressive, was then, by reason of obtrusive boyishness, still less
so; she found occasion to put him in the wrong by correcting a
false quantity; and when Mr. Austin, after doing his visitor the
almost unheard-of honour of accompanying him to the door, announced
'That was what young men were like in my time' - she could only
reply, looking on her handsome father, 'I thought they had been
better looking.'
This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it
was some time before Fleeming began to know his mind; and yet
longer ere he ventured to show it. The corrected quantity, to
those who knew him well, will seem to have played its part; he was
the man always to reflect over a correction and to admire the
castigator. And fall in love he did; not hurriedly but step by
step, not blindly but with critical discrimination; not in the
fashion of Romeo, but before he was done, with all Romeo's ardour
and more than Romeo's faith. The high favour to which he presently
rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife, might well give
him ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present and the
obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when his
aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps
for the only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence. There was
indeed opening before him a wide door of hope. He had changed into
the service of Messrs. Liddell & Gordon; these gentlemen had begun
to dabble in the new field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was
already face to face with his life's work. That impotent sense of
his own value, as of a ship aground, which makes one of the agonies
of youth, began to fall from him. New problems which he was
endowed to solve, vistas of new enquiry which he was fitted to
explore, opened before him continually. His gifts had found their
avenue and goal. And with this pleasure of effective exercise,
there must have sprung up at once the hope of what is called by the
world success. But from these low beginnings, it was a far look
upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always
more than problematical to any lover; the consent of parents must
be always more than doubtful to a young man with a small salary and
no capital except capacity and hope. But Fleeming was not the lad
to lose any good thing for the lack of trial; and at length, in the
autumn of 1857, this boyish-sized, boyish-mannered, and
superlatively ill-dressed young engineer, entered the house of the
Austins, with such sinkings as we may fancy, and asked leave to pay
his addresses to the daughter. Mrs. Austin already loved him like
a son, she was but too glad to give him her consent; Mr. Austin
reserved the right to inquire into his character; from neither was
there a word about his prospects, by neither was his income
mentioned. 'Are these people,' he wrote, struck with wonder at
this dignified disinterestedness, 'are these people the same as
other people?' It was not till he was armed with this permission,
that Miss Austin even suspected the nature of his hopes: so
strong, in this unmannerly boy, was the principle of true courtesy;
so powerful, in this impetuous nature, the springs of self-
repression. And yet a boy he was; a boy in heart and mind; and it
was with a boy's chivalry and frankness that he won his wife. His
conduct was a model of honour, hardly of tact; to conceal love from
the loved one, to court her parents, to be silent and discreet till
these are won, and then without preparation to approach the lady -
these are not arts that I would recommend for imitation. They lead
to final refusal. Nothing saved Fleeming from that fate, but one
circumstance that cannot be counted upon - the hearty favour of the
mother, and one gift that is inimitable and that never failed him
throughout life, the gift of a nature essentially noble and
outspoken. A happy and high-minded anger flashed through his
despair: it won for him his wife.
Nearly two years passed before it was possible to marry: two years
of activity, now in London; now at Birkenhead, fitting out ships,
inventing new machinery for new purposes, and dipping into
electrical experiment; now in the ELBA on his first telegraph
cruise between Sardinia and Algiers: a busy and delightful period
of bounding ardour, incessant toil, growing hope and fresh
interests, with behind and through all, the image of his beloved.
A few extracts from his correspondence with his betrothed will give
the note of these truly joyous years. 'My profession gives me all
the excitement and interest I ever hope for, but the sorry jade is
obviously jealous of you.' - '"Poor Fleeming," in spite of wet,
cold and wind, clambering over moist, tarry slips, wandering among
pools of slush in waste places inhabited by wandering locomotives,
grows visibly stronger, has dismissed his office cough and cured
his toothache.' - 'The whole of the paying out and lifting
machinery must be designed and ordered in two or three days, and I
am half crazy with work. I like it though: it's like a good ball,
the excitement carries you through.' - 'I was running to and from
the ships and warehouse through fierce gusts of rain and wind till
near eleven, and you cannot think what a pleasure it was to be
blown about and think of you in your pretty dress.' - 'I am at the
works till ten and sometimes till eleven. But I have a nice office
to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass scientific
instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments to
make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity
so entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work.' And for a
last taste, 'Yesterday I had some charming electrical experiments.
What shall I compare them to - a new song? a Greek play?'
It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of
Professor, now Sir William, Thomson. To describe the part played
by these two in each other's lives would lie out of my way. They
worked together on the Committee on Electrical Standards; they
served together at the laying down or the repair of many deep-sea
cables; and Sir William was regarded by Fleeming, not only with the
'worship' (the word is his own) due to great scientific gifts, but
with an ardour of personal friendship not frequently excelled. To
their association, Fleeming brought the valuable element of a
practical understanding; but he never thought or spoke of himself
where Sir William was in question; and I recall quite in his last
days, a singular instance of this modest loyalty to one whom he
admired and loved. He drew up a paper, in a quite personal
interest, of his own services; yet even here he must step out of
his way, he must add, where it had no claim to be added, his
opinion that, in their joint work, the contributions of Sir William
had been always greatly the most valuable. Again, I shall not
readily forget with what emotion he once told me an incident of
their associated travels. On one of the mountain ledges of
Madeira, Fleeming's pony bolted between Sir William. and the
precipice above; by strange good fortune and thanks to the
steadiness of Sir William's horse, no harm was done; but for the
moment, Fleeming saw his friend hurled into the sea, and almost by
his own act: it was a memory that haunted him.
CHAPTER IV. 1859-1868.
Fleeming's Marriage - His Married Life - Professional Difficulties
- Life at Claygate - Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin; and of Fleeming -
Appointment to the Chair at Edinburgh.
ON Saturday, Feb. 26, 1859, profiting by a holiday of four days,
Fleeming was married to Miss Austin at Northiam: a place connected
not only with his own family but with that of his bride as well.
By Tuesday morning, he was at work again, fitting out cableships at
Birkenhead. Of the walk from his lodgings to the works, I find a
graphic sketch in one of his letters: 'Out over the railway
bridge, along a wide road raised to the level of a ground floor
above the land, which, not being built upon, harbours puddles,
ponds, pigs, and Irish hovels; - so to the dock warehouses, four
huge piles of building with no windows, surrounded by a wall about
twelve feet high - in through the large gates, round which hang
twenty or thirty rusty Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting
for employment; - on along the railway, which came in at the same
gates and which branches down between each vast block - past a
pilot-engine butting refractory trucks into their places - on to
the last block, [and] down the branch, sniffing the guano-scented
air and detecting the old bones. The hartshorn flavour of the
guano becomes very strong, as I near the docks where, across the
ELBA'S decks, a huge vessel is discharging her cargo of the brown
dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that same cargo
for the last five months.' This was the walk he took his young
wife on the morrow of his return. She had been used to the society
of lawyers and civil servants, moving in that circle which seems to
itself the pivot of the nation and is in truth only a clique like
another; and Fleeming was to her the nameless assistant of a
nameless firm of engineers, doing his inglorious business, as she
now saw for herself, among unsavoury surroundings. But when their
walk brought them within view of the river, she beheld a sight to
her of the most novel beauty: four great, sea-going ships dressed
out with flags. 'How lovely!' she cried. 'What is it for?' - 'For
you,' said Fleeming. Her surprise was only equalled by her
pleasure. But perhaps, for what we may call private fame, there is
no life like that of the engineer; who is a great man in out-of-
the-way places, by the dockside or on the desert island or in
populous ships, and remains quite unheard of in the coteries of
London. And Fleeming had already made his mark among the few who
had an opportunity of knowing him.
His marriage was the one decisive incident of his career; from that
moment until the day of his death, he had one thought to which all
the rest were tributary, the thought of his wife. No one could
know him even slightly, and not remark the absorbing greatness of
that sentiment; nor can any picture of the man be drawn that does
not in proportion dwell upon it. This is a delicate task; but if
we are to leave behind us (as we wish) some presentment of the
friend we have lost, it is a task that must be undertaken.
For all his play of mind and fancy, for all his indulgence - and,
as time went on, he grew indulgent - Fleeming had views of duty
that were even stern. He was too shrewd a student of his fellow-
men to remain long content with rigid 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
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