It did not matter why he entered upon any study or employment,
whether for amusement like the Greek tailoring or the Highland
reels, whether from a desire to serve the public as with his
sanitary work, or in the view of benefiting poorer men as with
his labours for technical education, he ‘pitched into
it’ (as he would have said himself) with the same headlong
zest. I give in the Appendix a letter from Colonel
Fergusson, which tells fully the nature of the sanitary work and
of Fleeming’s part and success in it. It will be
enough to say here that it was a scheme of protection against the
blundering of builders and the dishonesty of plumbers.
Started with an eye rather to the houses of the rich, Fleeming
hoped his Sanitary Associations would soon extend their sphere of
usefulness and improve the dwellings of the poor. In this
hope he was disappointed; but in all other ways the scheme
exceedingly prospered, associations sprang up and continue to
spring up in many quarters, and wherever tried they have been
found of use.
Here, then, was a serious employment; it has proved highly
useful to mankind; and it was begun besides, in a mood of
bitterness, under the shock of what Fleeming would so sensitively
feel—the death of a whole family of children. Yet it
was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read in Colonel
Fergusson’s letter that his schoolmates bantered him when
he began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the
banter as he always did with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed
me with the question: ‘And now do you see any other jokes
to make? Well, then,’ said he, ‘that’s
all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we
can be serious.’ And then with a glowing heat of
pleasure, he laid his plans before me, revelling in the details,
revelling in hope. It was as he wrote about the joy of
electrical experiment. ‘What shall I compare them
to? A new song?—a Greek play?’ Delight
attended the exercise of all his powers; delight painted the
future. Of these ideal visions, some (as I have said)
failed of their fruition. And the illusion was
characteristic. Fleeming believed we had only to make a
virtue cheap and easy, and then all would practise it; that for
an end unquestionably good, men would not grudge a little trouble
and a little money, though they might stumble at laborious pains
and generous sacrifices. He could not believe in any
resolute badness. ‘I cannot quite say,’ he
wrote in his young manhood, ‘that I think there is no sin
or misery. This I can say: I do not remember one single
malicious act done to myself. In fact it is rather awkward
when I have to say the Lord’s Prayer. I have
nobody’s trespasses to forgive.’ And to the
point, I remember one of our discussions. I said it was a
dangerous error not to admit there were bad people; he, that it
was only a confession of blindness on our part, and that we
probably called others bad only so far as we were wrapped in
ourselves and lacking in the transmigratory forces of
imagination. I undertook to describe to him three persons
irredeemably bad and whom he should admit to be so. In the
first case, he denied my evidence: ‘You cannot judge a man
upon such testimony,’ said he. For the second, he
owned it made him sick to hear the tale; but then there was no
spark of malice, it was mere weakness I had described, and he had
never denied nor thought to set a limit to man’s
weakness. At my third gentleman, he struck his
colours. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I’m
afraid that is a bad man.’ And then looking at me
shrewdly: ‘I wonder if it isn’t a very unfortunate
thing for you to have met him.’ I showed him
radiantly how it was the world we must know, the world as it was,
not a world expurgated and prettified with optimistic
rainbows. ‘Yes, yes,’ said he; ‘but this
badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won’t you
be tempted to use it, instead of trying to understand
people?’
In the year 1878, he took a passionate fancy for the
phonograph: it was a toy after his heart, a toy that touched the
skirts of life, art, and science, a toy prolific of problems and
theories. Something fell to be done for a University
Cricket Ground Bazaar. ‘And the thought struck
him,’ Mr. Ewing writes to me, ‘to exhibit
Edison’s phonograph, then the very newest scientific
marvel. The instrument itself was not to be
purchased—I think no specimen had then crossed the
Atlantic—but a copy of the Times with an account of
it was at hand, and by the help of this we made a phonograph
which to our great joy talked, and talked, too, with the purest
American accent. It was so good that a second instrument
was got ready forthwith. Both were shown at the Bazaar: one
by Mrs. Jenkin to people willing to pay half a crown for a
private view and the privilege of hearing their own voices, while
Jenkin, perfervid as usual, gave half-hourly lectures on the
other in an adjoining room—I, as his lieutenant, taking
turns. The thing was in its way a little triumph. A
few of the visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief that they
were the victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle. Of
the others, many who came to scoff remained to take raffle
tickets; and one of the phonographs was finally disposed of in
this way, falling, by a happy freak of the ballot-box, into the
hands of Sir William Thomson.’ The other remained in
Fleeming’s hands, and was a source of infinite
occupation. Once it was sent to London, ‘to bring
back on the tinfoil the tones of a lady distinguished for clear
vocalisations; at another time Sir Robert Christison was brought
in to contribute his powerful bass’; and there scarcely
came a visitor about the house, but he was made the subject of
experiment. The visitors, I am afraid, took their parts
lightly: Mr. Hole and I, with unscientific laughter,
commemorating various shades of Scotch accent, or proposing to
‘teach the poor dumb animal to swear.’ But
Fleeming and Mr. Ewing, when we butterflies were gone, were
laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later
years of my friend were caught from the small utterance of that
toy. Thence came his inquiries into the roots of articulate
language and the foundations of literary art; his papers on vowel
sounds, his papers in the Saturday Review upon the laws of
verse, and many a strange approximation, many a just note, thrown
out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of his
interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph,
because it seems to me that it depicts the man. So, for
Fleeming, one thing joined into another, the greater with the
less. He cared not where it was he scratched the surface of
the ultimate mystery—in the child’s toy, in the great
tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the properties of
energy or mass—certain that whatever he touched, it was a
part of life—and however he touched it, there would flow
for his happy constitution interest and delight. ‘All
fables have their morals,’ says Thoreau, ‘but the
innocent enjoy the story.’ There is a truth
represented for the imagination in these lines of a noble poem,
where we are told, that in our highest hours of visionary
clearness, we can but
‘see the
children sport upon the shore
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’
To this clearness Fleeming had attained; and although he heard
the voice of the eternal seas and weighed its message, he was yet
able, until the end of his life, to sport upon these shores of
death and mystery with the gaiety and innocence of children.
