Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (716 page)

II

Fleeming was all his life a lover of the play and all that belonged to it. Dramatic literature he knew fully. He was one of the not very numerous people who can read a play: a knack, the fruit of much knowledge and some imagination, comparable to that of reading score. Few men better understood the artificial principles on which a play is good or bad; few more unaffectedly enjoyed a piece of any merit of construction. His own play was conceived with a double design; for he had long been filled with his theory of the true story of Griselda; used to gird at Father Chaucer for his misconception; and was, perhaps first of all, moved by the desire to do justice to the Marquis of Saluces, and perhaps only in the second place by the wish to treat a story (as he phrased it) like a sum in arithmetic. I do not think he quite succeeded; but I must own myself no fit judge. Fleeming and I were teacher and taught as to the principles, disputatious rivals in the practice, of dramatic writing.

Acting had always, ever since Rachel and the “
Marseillaise
,” a particular power on him. “If I do not cry at the play,” he used to say, “I want to have my money back.” Even from a poor play with poor actors he could 272 draw pleasure. “Glacometti’s
Elisabetta
,” I find him writing, “fetched the house vastly. Poor Queen Elizabeth! And yet it was a little good.” And again, after a night of Salvini: “I do not suppose any one with feelings could sit out
Othello
if Iago and Desdemona were acted.” Salvini was, in his view, the greatest actor he had seen. We were all indeed moved and bettered by the visit of that wonderful man. — ”I declare I feel as if I could pray!” cried one of us, on the return from
Hamlet
. — ”That is prayer,” said Fleeming. W. B. Hole and I, in a fine enthusiasm of gratitude, determined to draw up an address to Salvini, did so, and carried it to Fleeming; and I shall never forget with what coldness he heard and deleted the eloquence of our draft, nor with what spirit (our vanities once properly mortified) he threw himself into the business of collecting signatures. It was his part, on the ground of his Italian, to see and arrange with the actor; it was mine to write in the
Academy
a notice of the first performance of
Macbeth
. Fleeming opened the paper, read so far, and flung it on the floor. “No,” he cried, “that won’t do. You were thinking of yourself, not of Salvini!” The criticism was shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through ignorance; it was not of myself that I was thinking, but of the difficulties of my trade, which I had not well mastered. Another unalloyed dramatic pleasure, which Fleeming and I shared the year of the Paris Exposition, was the
Marquis de Villemer
, that blameless play, performed by Madeleine Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat — an actress, in such parts at least, to whom I have never seen full justice rendered. He had his fill of weeping on that occasion; and when the piece was at an end, in front of a café, in the mild, midnight air, we had our fill of talk about the art of acting.

But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an inheritance from Norwich, from Edward Barren, and from Enfield of the “Speaker.” The theatre was one of Edward Barren’s elegant hobbies; he read plays, as 273 became Enfield’s son-in-law, with a good discretion; he wrote plays for his family, in which Eliza Barron used to shine in the chief parts; and later in life, after the Norwich home was broken up, his little granddaughter would sit behind him in a great arm-chair, and be introduced, with his stately elocution, to the world of dramatic literature. From this, in a direct line, we can deduce the charades at Claygate; and after money came, in the Edinburgh days, that private theatre which took up so much of Fleeming’s energy and thought. The company — Mr. and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain Charles Douglas, Mr. Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr. Charles Baxter, and many more — made a charming society for themselves, and gave pleasure to their audience. Mr. Carter in Sir Toby Belch it would be hard to beat. Mr. Hole in broad farce, or as the herald in the
Trachiniæ
, showed true stage talent. As for Mrs. Jenkin, it was for her the rest of us existed and were forgiven; her powers were an endless spring of pride and pleasure to her husband; he spent hours hearing and schooling her in private; and when it came to the performance, though there was perhaps no one in the audience more critical, none was more moved than Fleeming. The rest of us did not aspire so high. There were always five performances and weeks of busy rehearsal; and whether we came to sit and stifle as the prompter, to be the dumb (or rather the inarticulate) recipients of Carter’s dog whip in the
Taming of the Shrew
, or, having earned our spurs, to lose one more illusion in a leading part, we were always sure at least of a long and an exciting holiday in mirthful company.

In this laborious annual diversion Fleeming’s part was large. I never thought him an actor, but he was something of a mimic, which stood him in stead. Thus he had seen Got in Poirier; and his own Poirier, when he came to play it, breathed meritoriously of the model. The last part I saw him play was Triplet, and at first I 274 thought it promised well. But alas! the boys went for a holiday, missed a train, and were not heard of at home till late at night. Poor Fleeming, the man who never hesitated to give his sons a chisel or a gun, or to send them abroad in a canoe or on a horse, toiled all day at his rehearsal, growing hourly paler, Triplet growing hourly less meritorious. And though the return of the children, none the worse for their little adventure, brought the colour back into his face, it could not restore him to his part. I remember finding him seated on the stairs in some rare moment of quiet during the subsequent performances. “Hullo, Jenkin,” said I, “you look down in the mouth.” “My dear boy,” said he, “haven’t you heard me? I have not had one decent intonation from beginning to end.”

But indeed he never supposed himself an actor; took a part, when he took any, merely for convenience, as one takes a hand at whist; and found his true service and pleasure in the more congenial business of the manager. Augier, Racine, Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere’s translation, Sophocles and Æschylus in Lewis Campbell’s, such were some of the authors whom he introduced to his public. In putting these upon the stage, he found a thousand exercises for his ingenuity and taste, a thousand problems arising which he delighted to study, a thousand opportunities to make those infinitesimal improvements which are so much in art and for the artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the professional costumier, with unforgettable results of comicality and indecorum; the second, the
Trachiniæ
of Sophocles, he took in hand himself, and a delightful task he made of it. His study was then in antiquarian books, where he found confusion, and on statues and bas-reliefs, where he at last found clearness; after an hour or so at the British Museum he was able to master “the chitôn, sleeves and all”; and before the time was ripe he had a theory of Greek tailoring at his fingers’ ends, and had all the costumes 275 made under his eye as a Greek tailor would have made them. “The Greeks made the best plays and the best statues, and were the best architects; of course, they were the best tailors too,” said he; and was never weary, when he could find a tolerant listener, of dwelling on the simplicity, the economy, the elegance both of means and effect, which made their system so delightful.

But there is another side to the stage-manager’s employment. The discipline of acting is detestable; the failures and triumphs of that business appeal too directly to the vanity; and even in the course of a careful amateur performance such as ours, much of the smaller side of man will be displayed. Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he might be wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all his, and he must decide. He was, in this as in all other things, an iron taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able. I have known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon. And yet he gained and retained warm feelings from far the most of those who fell under his domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete accomplishments of a girls’ school, there was something at first annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of accomplishment and perseverance.

III

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 276 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 277 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 278 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.” 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 vocalisation”; 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 Scottish 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 279 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 those lines of a noble poem, where we are told that in our highest hours of visionary clearness we can but