Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

CHAPTER VI. - 1869-1885.

 

Edinburgh - Colleagues - FARRAGO VITAE - I. The Family Circle -  Fleeming and his Sons - Highland Life - The Cruise of the Steam  Launch - Summer in Styria - Rustic Manners - II. The Drama -  Private Theatricals - III. Sanitary Associations - The Phonograph -  IV. Fleeming's Acquaintance with a Student - His late Maturity of  Mind - Religion and Morality - His Love of Heroism - Taste in  Literature - V. His Talk - His late Popularity - Letter from M.  Trelat.

 

 THE remaining external incidents of Fleeming's life, pleasures,  honours, fresh interests, new friends, are not such as will bear to  be told at any length or in the temporal order.  And it is now time  to lay narration by, and to look at the man he was and the life he  lived, more largely.

 

Edinburgh, which was thenceforth to be his home, is a metropolitan  small town; where college professors and the lawyers of the  Parliament House give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted  by educational advantages, make up much of the bulk of society.   Not, therefore, an unlettered place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh  will compare favourably with much larger cities.  A hard and  disputatious element has been commented on by strangers:  it would  not touch Fleeming, who was himself regarded, even in this  metropolis of disputation, as a thorny table-mate.  To golf  unhappily he did not take, and golf is a cardinal virtue in the  city of the winds.  Nor did he become an archer of the Queen's  Body-Guard, which is the Chiltern Hundreds of the distasted golfer.   He did not even frequent the Evening Club, where his colleague Tait  (in my day) was so punctual and so genial.  So that in some ways he  stood outside of the lighter and kindlier life of his new home.  I  should not like to say that he was generally popular; but there as  elsewhere, those who knew him well enough to love him, loved him  well.  And he, upon his side, liked a place where a dinner party  was not of necessity unintellectual, and where men stood up to him  in argument.

 

The presence of his old classmate, Tait, was one of his early  attractions to the chair; and now that Fleeming is gone again, Tait  still remains, ruling and really teaching his great classes.  Sir  Robert Christison was an old friend of his mother's; Sir Alexander  Grant, Kelland, and Sellar, were new acquaintances and highly  valued; and these too, all but the last, have been taken from their  friends and labours.  Death has been busy in the Senatus.  I will  speak elsewhere of Fleeming's demeanour to his students; and it  will be enough to add here that his relations with his colleagues  in general were pleasant to himself.

 

Edinburgh, then, with its society, its university work, its  delightful scenery, and its skating in the winter, was thenceforth  his base of operations.  But he shot meanwhile erratic in many  directions:  twice to America, as we have seen, on telegraph  voyages; continually to London on business; often to Paris; year  after year to the Highlands to shoot, to fish, to learn reels and  Gaelic, to make the acquaintance and fall in love with the  character of Highlanders; and once to Styria, to hunt chamois and  dance with peasant maidens.  All the while, he was pursuing the  course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking  up the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation;  reading, writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations,  interested in technical education, investigating the laws of metre,  drawing, acting, directing private theatricals, going a long way to  see an actor - a long way to see a picture; in the very bubble of  the tideway of contemporary interests.  And all the while he was  busied about his father and mother, his wife, and in particular his  sons; anxiously watching, anxiously guiding these, and plunging  with his whole fund of youthfulness into their sports and  interests.  And all the while he was himself maturing - not in  character or body, for these remained young - but in the stocked  mind, in the tolerant knowledge of life and man, in pious  acceptance of the universe.  Here is a farrago for a chapter:  here  is a world of interests and activities, human, artistic, social,  scientific, at each of which he sprang with impetuous pleasure, on  each of which he squandered energy, the arrow drawn to the head,  the whole intensity of his spirit bent, for the moment, on the  momentary purpose.  It was this that lent such unusual interest to  his society, so that no friend of his can forget that figure of  Fleeming coming charged with some new discovery:  it is this that  makes his character so difficult to represent.  Our fathers, upon  some difficult theme, would invoke the Muse; I can but appeal to  the imagination of the reader.  When I dwell upon some one thing,  he must bear in mind it was only one of a score; that the  unweariable brain was teeming at the very time with other thoughts;  that the good heart had left no kind duty forgotten.

 

 I.

 

 In Edinburgh, for a considerable time, Fleeming's family, to three  generations, was united:  Mr. and Mrs. Austin at Hailes, Captain  and Mrs. Jenkin in the suburb of Merchiston, Fleeming himself in  the city.  It is not every family that could risk with safety such  close interdomestic dealings; but in this also Fleeming was  particularly favoured.  Even the two extremes, Mr. Austin and the  Captain, drew together.  It is pleasant to find that each of the  old gentlemen set a high value on the good looks of the other,  doubtless also on his own; and a fine picture they made as they  walked the green terrace at Hailes, conversing by the hour.  What  they talked of is still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr.  Austin always declared that on these occasions he learned much.  To  both of these families of elders, due service was paid of  attention; to both, Fleeming's easy circumstances had brought joy;  and the eyes of all were on the grandchildren.  In Fleeming's  scheme of duties, those of the family stood first; a man was first  of all a child, nor did he cease to be so, but only took on added  obligations, when he became in turn a father.  The care of his  parents was always a first thought with him, and their  gratification his delight.  And the care of his sons, as it was  always a grave subject of study with him, and an affair never  neglected, so it brought him a thousand satisfactions.  'Hard work  they are,' as he once wrote, 'but what fit work!'  And again:  'O,  it's a cold house where a dog is the only representative of a  child!'  Not that dogs were despised; we shall drop across the name  of Jack, the harum-scarum Irish terrier ere we have done; his own  dog Plato went up with him daily to his lectures, and still (like  other friends) feels the loss and looks visibly for the  reappearance of his master; and Martin, the cat, Fleeming has  himself immortalised, to the delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the  columns of the SPECTATOR.  Indeed there was nothing in which men  take interest, in which he took not some; and yet always most in  the strong human bonds, ancient as the race and woven of delights  and duties.

 

He was even an anxious father; perhaps that is the part where  optimism is hardest tested.  He was eager for his sons; eager for  their health, whether of mind or body; eager for their education;  in that, I should have thought, too eager.  But he kept a pleasant  face upon all things, believed in play, loved it himself, shared  boyishly in theirs, and knew how to put a face of entertainment  upon business and a spirit of education into entertainment.  If he  was to test the progress of the three boys, this advertisement  would appear in their little manuscript paper:- 'Notice:  The  Professor of Engineering in the University of Edinburgh intends at  the close of the scholastic year to hold examinations in the  following subjects:  (1)  For boys in the fourth class of the  Academy - Geometry and Algebra; (2)  For boys at Mr. Henderson's  school - Dictation and Recitation; (3)  For boys taught exclusively  by their mothers - Arithmetic and Reading.'  Prizes were given; but  what prize would be so conciliatory as this boyish little joke?  It  may read thin here; it would smack racily in the playroom.   Whenever his sons 'started a new fad' (as one of them writes to me)  they 'had only to tell him about it, and he was at once interested  and keen to help.'  He would discourage them in nothing unless it  was hopelessly too hard for them; only, if there was any principle  of science involved, they must understand the principle; and  whatever was attempted, that was to be done thoroughly.  If it was  but play, if it was but a puppetshow they were to build, he set  them the example of being no sluggard in play.  When Frewen, the  second son, embarked on the...