Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (705 page)

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 202 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

1851-1

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

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

From half-past eight till six, he must “file and chip vigorously in a moleskin suit and infernally dirty.” The work was not new to him, for he had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work was 204 without interest. Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know and do also. “I never learned anything,” he wrote, “not even standing on my head, but I found a use for it.” In the spare hours of his first telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he meant “to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the ship, and how to handle her on any occasion”; and once when he was shown a young lady’s holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, “It showed me my eyes had been idle.” Nor was his the case of the mere literary smatterer, content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do and to do well was even a dearer ambition than to know. Anything done well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him. I remember him with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly fitted that, when one was driven home, the others started from their places; the whole spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box; that plain piece of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of perfection as the happiest drawing or the finest bronze, and he who could not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo’s engineering and anatomical drawings a perpetual feast; and of the former he spoke even with emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to separate the fine arts from the arts of handicraft; any definition or theory that failed to bring these two together, according to him, had missed the point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing things well done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last to deny that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all. And on the other hand, a nail ill driven, a joint ill fitted, a tracing clumsily done, anything to which a man had set his hand and not set it aptly, moved him to shame and anger. With such a character, he would feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn’s. There would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file, as he had practised 205 scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but resolute to learn.

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

A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn’s, a pupil would never be popular unless he drank with the workmen and imitated them in speech and manner. Fleeming, who would do none of these things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the subject of remark in Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till to-day. He thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be brought in a close relation with the working classes; and for the skilled artisan he had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues, and his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well to regard them, like a platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, on the other hand, broad distinctions; and it was his profound 206 sense of the difference between one working man and another that led him to devote so much time, in later days, to the furtherance of technical education. In 1852 he had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in the excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both would seem to have behaved. Beginning with a fair show of justice on either side, the masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy, and the men disgraced their order by acts of outrage. “On Wednesday last,” writes Fleeming, “about three thousand banded round Fairbairn’s door at 6 o’clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders came that no one was to leave the works; but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my companions and myself went out with the very first, and had the full benefit of every possible groan and bad language.” But the police cleared a lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape unhurt, and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill of expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob. “I never before felt myself so decidedly somebody, instead of nobody,” he wrote.

Outside as inside the works, he was “pretty merry and well-to-do,” zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-kindness to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell, “working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek architectural proportions”: a business after Fleeming’s heart, for he was never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and science. This was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the greatest, from the
Agamemnon
(perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to express in his familiar phrase: “The Greeks were 207 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 208 will understand and, in their own cases, remember. With the girls he had “constant fierce wrangles,” forcing them to reason out their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish devotion to his parents. Of one of these wrangles I have found a record most characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right “to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar, or to steal a knife to prevent a murder”; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what is current, had rejected the heresy with indignation. From such passages-at-arms many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration of the spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself “what truth was sticking in their heads”; for even the falsest form of words (in Fleeming’s life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as he could “not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire what is pretty in the ugly thing.” And before he sat down to write his letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. “I fancy the true idea,” he wrote, “is that you must never do yourself or any one else a moral injury — make any man a thief or a liar — for any end”; quite a different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not always out of key with his audience. One whom he met in the same house announced that she would never again be happy. “What does that signify?” cried Fleeming. “We are not here to be happy, but to be good.” And the words (as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of motto during life.

From Fairbairn’s and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn’s at Greenwich, where he was engaged as draughtsman. There, in 1856, we find him in “a terribly busy state, 209 finishing up engines for innumerable gunboats and steam frigates for the ensuing campaign.” From half-past eight in the morning till nine or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial comrades, “saluted by chaff, generally low, personal, and not witty,” pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be as little like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, “across a dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses”; he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to correspond. But not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who had made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings, unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical. “Sunday,” says he, “I generally visit some friends in town, and seem to swim in clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.” It is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to stand it without loss. “We are not here to be happy, but to be good,” quoth the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life besides, when, apart from circumstances, few men are agreeable to their neighbours, and still fewer to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had arrived, later than common, and even worse provided. The letter from which I have quoted is the last of his correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last confidential letter to one of his own sex. “If you consider it rightly,” he wrote long after, “you will find the want of correspondence no such strange want in men’s friendships. There is, believe me, something noble in the metal which does not rust, though not burnished by daily use.” It is well said; but the last letter to Frank Scott is scarcely 210 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.