Chapter VI: 1869–1885 (2)

Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more complete than his own, so that the very weapons of the fight were changed in his grasp to swords of paper. Certainly the church is not right, he would argue, but certainly not the anti-church either. Men are not such fools as to be wholly in the wrong, nor yet are they so placed as to be ever wholly in the right. Somewhere, in mid air between the disputants, like hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, the truth hangs undiscerned. And in the meanwhile what matter these uncertainties? Right is very obvious; a great consent of the best of mankind, a loud voice within us (whether of God, or whether by inheritance, and in that case still from God), guide and command us in the path of duty. He saw life very simple; he did not love refinements; he was a friend to much conformity in unessentials. For (he would argue) it is in this life as it stands about us, that we are given our problem; the manners of the day are the colours of our palette; they condition, they constrain us; and a man must be very sure he is in the right, must (in a favourite phrase of his) be ‘either very wise or very vain,’ to break with any general consent in ethics. I remember taking his advice upon some point of conduct. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘how do you suppose Christ would have advised you?’ and when I had answered that he would not have counselled me anything unkind or cowardly, ‘No,’ he said, with one of his shrewd strokes at the weakness of his hearer, ‘nor anything amusing.’ Later in life, he made less certain in the field of ethics. ‘The old story of the knowledge of good and evil is a very true one,’ I find him writing; only (he goes on) ‘the effect of the original dose is much worn out, leaving Adam’s descendants with the knowledge that there is such a thing—but uncertain where.’ His growing sense of this ambiguity made him less swift to condemn, but no less stimulating in counsel. ‘You grant yourself certain freedoms. Very well,’ he would say, ‘I want to see you pay for them some other way. You positively cannot do this: then there positively must be something else that you can do, and I want to see you find that out and do it.’ Fleeming would never suffer you to think that you were living, if there were not, somewhere in your life, some touch of heroism, to do or to endure.

This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man’s. He loved the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man’s unequal character ran through all his thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the pick-thank; being what we are, he wished us to see others with a generous eye of admiration, not with the smallness of the seeker after faults. If there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having found much entertainment in Voltaire’s _Saül_, and telling him what seemed to me the drollest touches. He heard me out, as usual when displeased, and then opened fire on me with red-hot shot. To belittle a noble story was easy; it was not literature, it was not art, it was not morality; there was no sustenance in such a form of jesting, there was (in his favourite phrase) ‘no nitrogenous food’ in such literature. And then he proceeded to show what a fine fellow David was; and what a hard knot he was in about Bathsheba, so that (the initial wrong committed) honour might well hesitate in the choice of conduct; and what owls those people were who marvelled because an Eastern tyrant had killed Uriah, instead of marvelling that he had not killed the prophet also. ‘Now if Voltaire had helped me to feel that,’ said he, ‘I could have seen some fun in it.’ He loved the comedy which shows a hero human, and yet leaves him a hero, and the laughter which does not lessen love.

It was this taste for what is fine in human-kind, that ruled his choice in books. These should all strike a high note, whether brave or tender, and smack of the open air. The noble and simple presentation of things noble and simple, that was the ‘nitrogenous food’ of which he spoke so much, which he sought so eagerly, enjoyed so royally. He wrote to an author, the first part of whose story he had seen with sympathy, hoping that it might continue in the same vein. ‘That this may be so,’ he wrote, ‘I long with the longing of David for the water of Bethlehem. But no man need die for the water a poet can give, and all can drink it to the end of time, and their thirst be quenched and the pool never dry—and the thirst and the water are both blessed.’ It was in the Greeks particularly that he found this blessed water; he loved ‘a fresh air’ which he found ‘about the Greek things even in translations’; he loved their freedom from the mawkish and the rancid. The tale of David in the Bible, the _Odyssey_, Sophocles, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray, and the _Tale of Two Cities_ out of Dickens: such were some of his preferences. To Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; _Burnt Njal_ was a late favourite; and he found at least a passing entertainment in the _Arcadia_ and the _Grand Cyrus_. George Eliot he outgrew, finding her latterly only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted, was great, and must have gone some way to form his mind. He was easily set on edge, however, by didactic writing; and held that books should teach no other lesson but what ‘real life would teach, were it as vividly presented.’ Again, it was the thing made that took him, the drama in the book; to the book itself, to any merit of the making, he was long strangely blind. He would prefer the _Agamemnon_ in the prose of Mr. Buckley, ay, to Keats. But he was his mother’s son, learning to the last. He told me one day that literature was not a trade; that it was no craft; that the professed author was merely an amateur with a door-plate. ‘Very well,’ said I, ‘the first time you get a proof, I will demonstrate that it is as much a trade as bricklaying, and that you do not know it.’ By the very next post, a proof came. I opened it with fear; for he was indeed, as the reader will see by these volumes, a formidable amateur; always wrote brightly, because he always thought trenchantly; and sometimes wrote brilliantly, as the worst of whistlers may sometimes stumble on a perfect intonation. But it was all for the best in the interests of his education; and I was able, over that proof, to give him a quarter of an hour such as Fleeming loved both to give and to receive. His subsequent training passed out of my hands into those of our common friend, W. E. Henley. ‘Henley and I,’ he wrote, ‘have fairly good times wigging one another for not doing better. I wig him because he won’t try to write a real play, and he wigs me because I can’t try to write English.’ When I next saw him, he was full of his new acquisitions. ‘And yet I have lost something too,’ he said regretfully. ‘Up to now Scott seemed to me quite perfect, he was all I wanted. Since I have been learning this confounded thing, I took up one of the novels, and a great deal of it is both careless and clumsy.’

V.

He spoke four languages with freedom, not even English with any marked propriety. What he uttered was not so much well said, as excellently acted: so we may hear every day the inexpressive language of a poorly-written drama assume character and colour in the hands of a good player. No man had more of the _vis comica_ in private life; he played no character on the stage, as he could play himself among his friends. It was one of his special charms; now when the voice is silent and the face still, it makes it impossible to do justice to his power in conversation. He was a delightful companion to such as can bear bracing weather; not to the very vain; not to the owlishly wise, who cannot have their dogmas canvassed; not to the painfully refined, whose sentiments become articles of faith. The spirit in which he could write that he was ‘much revived by having an opportunity of abusing Whistler to a knot of his special admirers,’ is a spirit apt to be misconstrued. He was not a dogmatist, even about Whistler. ‘The house is full of pretty things,’ he wrote, when on a visit; ‘but Mrs. —’s taste in pretty things has one very bad fault: it is not my taste.’ And that was the true attitude of his mind; but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and wrangle over by the hour. It was no wonder if he loved the Greeks; he was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been a sophist and met Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and done battle with him staunchly and manfully owned his defeat; and the dialogue, arranged by Plato, would have shown even in Plato’s gallery. He seemed in talk aggressive, petulant, full of a singular energy; as vain you would have said as a peacock, until you trod on his toes, and then you saw that he was at least clear of all the sicklier elements of vanity. Soundly rang his laugh at any jest against himself. He wished to be taken, as he took others, for what was good in him without dissimulation of the evil, for what was wise in him without concealment of the childish. He hated a draped virtue, and despised a wit on its own defence. And he drew (if I may so express myself) a human and humorous portrait of himself with all his defects and qualities, as he thus enjoyed in talk the robust sports of the intelligence; giving and taking manfully, always without pretence, always with paradox, always with exuberant pleasure; speaking wisely of what he knew, foolishly of what he knew not; a teacher, a learner, but still combative; picking holes in what was said even to the length of captiousness, yet aware of all that was said rightly; jubilant in victory, delighted by defeat: a Greek sophist, a British schoolboy.

Among the legends of what was once a very pleasant spot, the old Savile Club, not then divorced from Savile Row, there are many memories of Fleeming. He was not popular at first, being known simply as ‘the man who dines here and goes up to Scotland’; but he grew at last, I think, the most generally liked of all the members. To those who truly knew and loved him, who had tasted the real sweetness of his nature, Fleeming’s porcupine ways had always been a matter of keen regret. They introduced him to their own friends with fear; sometimes recalled the step with mortification. It was not possible to look on with patience while a man so lovable thwarted love at every step. But the course of time and the ripening of his nature brought a cure. It was at the Savile that he first remarked a change; it soon spread beyond the walls of the club. Presently I find him writing: ‘Will you kindly explain what has happened to me? All my life I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings, but nevertheless the result was that expressed above. Well, lately some change has happened. If I talk to a person one day, they must have me the next. Faces light up when they see me.—“Ah, I say, come here,”—“come and dine with me.” It’s the most preposterous thing I ever experienced. It is curiously pleasant. You have enjoyed it all your life, and therefore cannot conceive how bewildering a burst of it is for the first time at forty-nine.’ And this late sunshine of popularity still further softened him. He was a bit of a porcupine to the last, still shedding darts; or rather he was to the end a bit of a schoolboy, and must still throw stones, but the essential toleration that underlay his disputatiousness, and the kindness that made of him a tender sicknurse and a generous helper, shone more conspicuously through. A new pleasure had come to him; and as with all sound natures, he was bettered by the pleasure.

I can best show Fleeming in this later stage by quoting from a vivid and interesting letter of M. Emile Trélat’s. Here, admirably expressed, is how he appeared to a friend of another nation, whom he encountered only late in life. M. Trélat will pardon me if I correct, even before I quote him; but what the Frenchman supposed to flow from some particular bitterness against France, was only Fleeming’s usual address. Had M. Trélat been Italian, Italy would have fared as ill; and yet Italy was Fleeming’s favourite country.

Vous savez comment j’ai connu Fleeming Jenkin! C’était en Mai 1878.
Nous étions tous deux membres du jury de l’Exposition Universelle.
On n’avait rien fait qui vaille à la première séance de notre classe,
qui avait eu lieu le matin. Tout le monde avait parlé et reparlé
pour ne rien dire. Cela durait depuis huit heures; il était midi.
Je demandai la parole pour une motion d’ordre, et je proposai que la
séance fut levée à la condition que chaque membre français,
_emportât_ à déjeuner un juré étranger. Jenkin applaudit. ‘Je vous
emmène déjeuner,’ lui criai-je. ‘Je veux bien.’ . . . Nous partîmes;
en chemin nous vous rencontrions; il vous présente et nous allons
déjeuner tous trois auprès du Trocadéro.

Et, depuis ce temps, nous avons été de vieux amis. Non seulement
nous passions nos journées au jury, où nous étions toujours ensemble,
côte-à-côte. Mais nos habitudes s’étaient faites telles que, non
contents de déjeuner en face l’un de l’autre, je le ramenais dîner
presque tous les jours chez moi. Cela dura une quinzaine: puis il
fut rappelé en Angleterre. Mais il revint, et nous fîmes encore une
bonne étape de vie intellectuelle, morale et philosophique. Je crois
qu’il me rendait déjà tout ce que j’éprouvais de sympathie et
d’estime, et que je ne fus pas pour rien dans son retour à Paris.

Chose singulière! nous nous étions attachés l’un à l’autre par les
sous-entendus bien plus que par la matière de nos conversations. À
vrai dire, nous étions presque toujours en discussion; et il nous
arrivait de nous rire au nez l’un et l’autre pendant des heures, tant
nous nous étonnions réciproquement de la diversité de nos points de
vue. Je le trouvais si Anglais, et il me trouvais si Français! Il
était si franchement révolté de certaines choses qu’il voyait chez
nous, et je comprenais si mal certaines choses qui se passaient chez
vous! Rien de plus intéressant que ces contacts qui étaient des
contrastes, et que ces rencontres d’idées qui étaient des choses;
rien de si attachant que les échappées de cœur ou d’esprit auxquelles
ces petits conflits donnaient à tout moment cours. C’est dans ces
conditions que, pendant son séjour à Paris en 1878, je conduisis un
peu partout mon nouvel ami. Nous allâmes chez Madame Edmond Adam, où
il vit passer beaucoup d’hommes politiques avec lesquels il causa.
Mais c’est chez les ministres qu’il fut intéressé. Le moment était,
d’ailleurs, curieux en France. Je me rappelle que, lorsque je le
présentai au Ministre du Commerce, il fit cette spirituelle repartie:
‘C’est la seconde fois que je viens en France sous la République. La
première fois, c’était en 1848, elle s’était coiffée de travers: je
suis bien heureux de saluer aujourd’hui votre excellence, quand elle
a mis son chapeau droit.’ Une fois je le menai voir couronner la
Rosière de Nanterre. Il y suivit les cérémonies civiles et
religieuses; il y assista au banquet donné par le Maire; il y vit
notre de Lesseps, auquel il porta un toast. Le soir, nous revînmes
tard à Paris; il faisait chaud; nous étions un peu fatigués; nous
entrâmes dans un des rares cafés encore ouverts. Il devint
silencieux.—‘N’êtes-vous pas content de votre journée?’ lui
dis-je.—‘O, si! mais je réfléchis, et je me dis que vous êtes un
peuple gai—tous ces braves gens étaient gais aujourd’hui. C’est une
vertu, la gaieté, et vous l’avez en France, cette vertu!’ Il me
disait cela mélancoliquement; et c’était la première fois que je lui
entendais faire une louange adressée à la France. . . . Mais il ne
faut pas que vous voyiez là une plainte de ma part. Je serais un
ingrat si je me plaignais; car il me disait souvent: ‘Quel bon
Français vous faites!’ Et il m’aimait à cause de cela, quoiqu’il
semblât n’aimer pas la France. C’était là un trait de son
originalité. Il est vrai qu’il s’en tirait en disant que je ne
ressemblai pas à mes compatriotes, ce à quoi il ne connaissait
rien!—Tout cela était fort curieux; car, moi-même, je l’aimais
quoiqu’il en eût à mon pays!

En 1879 il amena son fils Austin à Paris. J’attirai celui-ci. Il
déjeunait avec moi deux fois par semaine. Je lui montrai ce qu’était
l’intimité française en le tutoyant paternellement. Cela reserra
beaucoup nos liens d’intimité avec Jenkin. . . . Je fis inviter mon
ami au congrès de l’_Association française pour l’avancement des
sciences_, qui se tenait à Rheims en 1880. Il y vint. J’eus le
plaisir de lui donner la parole dans la section du génie civil et
militaire, que je présidais. Il y fit une très intéressante
communication, qui me montrait une fois de plus l’originalité de ses
vues et la sûreté de sa science. C’est à l’issue de ce congrès que
je passai lui faire visite à Rochefort, où je le trouvai installé en
famille et où je présentai pour la première fois mes hommages à son
éminente compagne. Je le vis là sous un jour nouveau et touchant
pour moi. Madame Jenkin, qu’il entourait si galamment, et ses deux
jeunes fils donnaient encore plus de relief à sa personne.
J’emportai des quelques heures que je passai à côte de lui dans ce
charmant paysage un souvenir ému.

J’étais allé en Angleterre en 1882 sans pouvoir gagner Edimbourg.
J’y retournai en 1883 avec la commission d’assainissement de la ville
de Paris, dont je faisais partie. Jenkin me rejoignit. Je le fis
entendre par mes collègues; car il était fondateur d’une société de
salubrité. Il eut un grand succès parmi nous. Mais ce voyage me
restera toujours en mémoire parce que c’est là que se fixa
défenitivement notre forte amitié. Il m’invita un jour à dîner à son
club et au moment de me faire asseoir à côté de lui, il me retint et
me dit: ‘Je voudrais vous demander de m’accorder quelque chose.
C’est mon sentiment que nos relations ne peuvent pas se bien
continuer si vous ne me donnez pas la permission de vous tutoyer.
Voulez-vous que nous nous tutoyions?’ Je lui pris les mains et je
lui dis qu’une pareille proposition venant d’un Anglais, et d’un
Anglais de sa haute distinction, c’était une victoire, dont je serais
fier toute ma vie. Et nous commencions à user de cette nouvelle
forme dans nos rapports. Vous savez avec quelle finesse il parlait
le français: comme il en connaissait tous les tours, comme il jouait
avec ses difficultés, et même avec ses petites gamineries. Je crois
qu’il a été heureux de pratiquer avec moi ce tutoiement, qui ne
s’adapte pas à l’anglais, et qui est si français. Je ne puis vous
peindre l’étendue et la variété de nos conversations de la soirée.
Mais ce que je puis vous dire, c’est que, sous la caresse du _tu_,
nos idées se sont élevées. Nous avions toujours beaucoup ri
ensemble; mais nous n’avions jamais laissé des banalités s’introduire
dans nos échanges de pensées. Ce soir-là, notre horizon intellectuel
s’est élargie, et nous y avons poussé des reconnaissances profondes
et lointaines. Après avoir vivement causé à table, nous avons
longuement causé au salon; et nous nous séparions le soir à Trafalgar
Square, après avoir longé les trottoirs, stationné aux coins des rues
et deux fois rebroussé chemin en nous reconduisant l’un l’autre. Il
était près d’une heure du matin! Mais quelle belle passe
d’argumentation, quels beaux échanges de sentiments, quelles fortes
confidences patriotiques nous avions fournies! J’ai compris ce soir
là que Jenkin ne détestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les
mains en l’embrassant. Nous nous quittions aussi amis qu’on puisse
l’être; et notre affection s’était par lui étendue et comprise dans
un _tu_ français.