xlviii MEMOIR 



' I never learned anything,' he wrote, c not even standing on 

 my head, but I found a use for it.' In the spare hours of his 

 first telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of 

 knowledge, he meant ' to learn the whole art of navigation, 

 every rope in the ship and how to handle her on any occasion ; 

 and once when he was shown a young lady's holiday collection 

 of seaweeds,, he must cry out, 'It showed me my eyes had been 

 idle.' Nor was his the case of the mere literary smatterer, 

 content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do and 

 to do well, was even a dearer ambition than to know. Any- 

 thing done well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and 

 inspired him. I remember him with a twopenny Japanese box 

 of three drawers, so exactly fitted that, when one was driven 

 home, the others started from their places ; the whole spirit of 

 Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box ; that plain piece 

 of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of perfection as 

 the happiest drawing or the finest bronze and he who could 

 not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the 

 others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo's engineering and 

 anatomical drawings a perpetual feast ; and of the former he 

 spoke even with emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed Fleeming 

 more than the attempt to separate the fine arts from the arts of 

 handicraft ; any definition or theory that failed to bring these 

 two together, according to him, had missed the point ; and the 

 essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing things well done. 

 Other qualities must be added ; he was the last to deny that ; 

 but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all. And on the 

 other hand, a nail ill-driven, a joint ill-fitted, a tracing clumsily 

 done, anything to which a man had set his hand and not set 

 it aptly, moved him to shame and anger. With such a 

 character, he would feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn's. 

 There would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be 

 avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be attained ; he would 

 chip and file, as he had practised scales, impatient of his own 

 imperfection but resolute to learn. 



And there was another spring of delight. For he was now 

 moving daily among those strange creations of man's brain, to 



