It was as a student that I first knew Fleeming, as one of that
modest number of young men who sat under his ministrations in a
soul-chilling class-room at the top of the University
buildings. His presence was against him as a professor: no
one, least of all students, would have been moved to respect him
at first sight: rather short in stature, markedly plain, boyishly
young in manner, cocking his head like a terrier with every mark
of the most engaging vivacity and readiness to be pleased, full
of words, full of paradox, a stranger could scarcely fail to look
at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could scarcely
fail to be engaged by him in talk, but a student would never
regard him as academical. Yet he had that fibre in him that
order always existed in his class-room. I do not remember
that he ever addressed me in language; at the least sign of
unrest, his eye would fall on me and I was quelled. Such a
feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I have
misbehaved in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than
Fleeming Jenkin’s. He was simply a man from whose
reproof one shrank; in manner the least buckrammed of mankind, he
had, in serious moments, an extreme dignity of goodness. So
it was that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate of
students, but a power of which I was myself unconscious. I
was inclined to regard any professor as a joke, and Fleeming as a
particularly good joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast
pleasantry of my curriculum. I was not able to follow his
lectures; I somehow dared not misconduct myself, as was my
customary solace; and I refrained from attending. This
brought me at the end of the session into a relation with my
contemned professor that completely opened my eyes. During
the year, bad student as I was, he had shown a certain leaning to
my society; I had been to his house, he had asked me to take a
humble part in his theatricals; I was a master in the art of
extracting a certificate even at the cannon’s mouth; and I
was under no apprehension. But when I approached Fleeming,
I found myself in another world; he would have naught of
me. ‘It is quite useless for you to come to
me, Mr. Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases, there is no
doubt about yours. You have simply not attended my
class.’ The document was necessary to me for family
considerations; and presently I stooped to such pleadings and
rose to such adjurations, as made my ears burn to remember.
He was quite unmoved; he had no pity for me.—‘You are
no fool,’ said he, ‘and you chose your
course.’ I showed him that he had misconceived his
duty, that certificates were things of form, attendance a matter
of taste. Two things, he replied, had been required for
graduation, a certain competency proved in the final trials and a
certain period of genuine training proved by certificate; if he
did as I desired, not less than if he gave me hints for an
examination, he was aiding me to steal a degree. ‘You
see, Mr. Stevenson, these are the laws and I am here to apply
them,’ said he. I could not say but that this view
was tenable, though it was new to me; I changed my attack: it was
only for my father’s eye that I required his signature, it
need never go to the Senatus, I had already certificates enough
to justify my year’s attendance. ‘Bring them to
me; I cannot take your word for that,’ said he.
‘Then I will consider.’ The next day I came
charged with my certificates, a humble assortment. And when
he had satisfied himself, ‘Remember,’ said he,
‘that I can promise nothing, but I will try to find a form
of words.’ He did find one, and I am still ashamed
when I think of his shame in giving me that paper. He made
no reproach in speech, but his manner was the more eloquent; it
told me plainly what a dirty business we were on; and I went from
his presence, with my certificate indeed in my possession, but
with no answerable sense of triumph. That was the bitter
beginning of my love for Fleeming; I never thought lightly of him
afterwards.
Once, and once only, after our friendship was truly founded,
did we come to a considerable difference. It was, by the
rules of poor humanity, my fault and his. I had been led to
dabble in society journalism; and this coming to his ears, he
felt it like a disgrace upon himself. So far he was exactly
in the right; but he was scarce happily inspired when he broached
the subject at his own table and before guests who were strangers
to me. It was the sort of error he was always ready to
repent, but always certain to repeat; and on this occasion he
spoke so freely that I soon made an excuse and left the house
with the firm purpose of returning no more. About a month
later, I met him at dinner at a common friend’s.
‘Now,’ said he, on the stairs, ‘I engage
you—like a lady to dance—for the end of the
evening. You have no right to quarrel with me and not give
me a chance.’ I have often said and thought that
Fleeming had no tact; he belied the opinion then. I
remember perfectly how, so soon as we could get together, he
began his attack: ‘You may have grounds of quarrel with me;
you have none against Mrs. Jenkin; and before I say another word,
I want you to promise you will come to her house as
usual.’ An interview thus begun could have but one
ending: if the quarrel were the fault of both, the merit of the
reconciliation was entirely Fleeming’s.
When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally
enough on his part, he had still something of the Puritan,
something of the inhuman narrowness of the good youth. It
fell from him slowly, year by year, as he continued to ripen, and
grow milder, and understand more generously the mingled
characters of men. In the early days he once read me a
bitter lecture; and I remember leaving his house in a fine spring
afternoon, with the physical darkness of despair upon my
eyesight. Long after he made me a formal retractation of
the sermon and a formal apology for the pain he had inflicted;
adding drolly, but truly, ‘You see, at that time I was so
much younger than you!’ And yet even in those days
there was much to learn from him; and above all his fine spirit
of piety, bravely and trustfully accepting life, and his singular
delight in the heroic.
His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance. His
views (as they are called) upon religious matters varied much;
and he could never be induced to think them more or less than
views. ‘All dogma is to me mere form,’ he
wrote; ‘dogmas are mere blind struggles to express the
inexpressible. I cannot conceive that any single
proposition whatever in religion is true in the scientific sense;
and yet all the while I think the religious view of the world is
the most true view. Try to separate from the mass of their
statements that which is common to Socrates, Isaiah, David, St.
Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, Bunyan—yes, and
George Eliot: of course you do not believe that this something
could be written down in a set of propositions like Euclid,
neither will you deny that there is something common and this
something very valuable. . . . I shall be sorry if the boys ever
give a moment’s thought to the question of what community
they belong to—I hope they will belong to the great
community.’ I should observe that as time went on his
conformity to the church in which he was born grew more complete,
and his views drew nearer the conventional. ‘The
longer I live, my dear Louis,’ he wrote but a few months
before his death, ‘the more convinced I become of a direct
care by God—which is reasonably impossible—but there
it is.’ And in his last year he took the
communion.
But at the time when I fell under his influence, he stood more
aloof; and this made him the more impressive to a youthful
atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial
influence on men; language contained all the great and sound
metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once made and
generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and
reason. But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing
that words stand symbol for the indefinable. I came to him
once with a problem which had puzzled me out of measure: what is
a cause? why out of so many innumerable millions of conditions,
all necessary, should one be singled out and ticketed ‘the
cause’? ‘You do not understand,’ said
he. ‘A cause is the answer to a question: it
designates that condition which I happen to know and you happen
not to know.’ It was thus, with partial exception of
the mathematical, that he thought of all means of reasoning: they
were in his eyes but means of communication, so to be understood,
so to be judged, and only so far to be credited. The
mathematical he made, I say, exception of: number and measure he
believed in to the extent of their significance, but that
significance, he was never weary of reminding you, was slender to
the verge of nonentity. Science was true, because it told
us almost nothing. With a few abstractions it could deal,
and deal correctly; conveying honestly faint truths. Apply
its means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of
the wise became a childish jargon.
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.’
