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 282 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 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 283 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. 284 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 285 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 pickthank; 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. 286 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 humankind 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 287 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, 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 shone 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 289 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 without 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 290 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 sick-nurse and a generous helper, shone more conspicuously through. A new pleasure had come to him; and as with a
ll sound natures, he was bettered by the pleasure.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 556
