Edinburgh—Colleagues—Farrago
Vitæ—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. Trélat.
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.
