He was fond of the society of his fellows, hospitably disposed, and of a warm, genial nature. Indeed he had a genius for friendship, and a boundless capacity for sympathy and kindness—instinctive, spontaneous, impulsive—the sort of sympathy where action follows hard upon the heels of inclination, and the kind of kindness which is doubled because it acts quickly. Innumerable instances of his little nameless, but not unremembered acts of kindness and of love might be culled from a correspondence which stretches over half a century. But one characteristic action must suffice:
10 Bramham Gardens,
November 25, 1893.
I heard of you yesterday as having been out in a bath-chair—poor man!—so I came to two conclusions: (1) That you had been very ill. (2) That you were better. We have just come back from three hours at Woodcote, and I said, “I wish Thorpe was here.” “Why not ask him and his wife to stay here next week?” said my better-half. So this I now do, and I hope you will go there: the air is lovely: the house is warm. There is an old woman who can cook—and an old man who cannot. You could take one of your own maids to wait, and there is everything ready—beds and sitting-rooms, bread and meat—only no whisky.
I shall be delighted if you will both go there on Tuesday. There is Judy the pony and its cart at your service, and I can order a closed carriage to take you up.
You must take care of yourself. This attack ought to be and will be a warning to you not to work on as you have done. It is serious, and I am, with many friends, anxious you should draw in your horns. Really your professional work is enough for one man, and what a pile you put on to the top of this!
Let me know, if possible, to-morrow (Sunday) night whether you will go. I am sure you would enjoy yourselves, and I will let E⸺ know so that all shall be ready.
No man was more quick to recognize and to appreciate merit and worthy motives. Of strong common sense, perfectly sincere, frank and direct of speech, of an integrity of purpose which was perfectly obvious and which admitted of no unworthy compromise, he was, as they say in the quaint forceful Lancashire dialect he loved at times to recall as the speech of his forerunners, his eminent grandfather included—“jannock”[31] to the backbone—the very type we associate with the national character. These marks of his personality constituted the source of his influence. A broad-minded man, who thought spaciously and did things magnanimously, nature intended him to be a leader. His example was infectious, and nowhere was it more obvious than at Owens College, where the success of his own department was a constant stimulus to his colleagues. Men valued his counsel because they trusted his judgment.
He knew his limitations as a man of science. He was too honest and sincere to cherish any illusions as to the position posterity would assign to him as a leader in chemical inquiry. The profound respect, amounting almost to reverence, he had for Faraday, Joule, Bunsen, Helmholtz—all men he learned to know personally—was based upon the knowledge that they had reached intellectual heights to which he could not climb. He had not the studious, contemplative habit of his master Graham. Contact with Williamson kindled no latent faculty for speculation. The shibboleths of modern chemistry—types, bonds, linkages, chains, etc., etc., had hardly more real meaning for him than they had for Bunsen, to whom they were practically unintelligible. It was characteristic of both that when, at Kekulé’s solicitation, they jointly attended the chemical congress on nomenclature at Carlsruhe in 1860, when Cannizzaro brought forward his memorable communication concerning the rational basis of fixing atomic and molecular weights, they should not have recognized its significance. Of course they were not singular in this respect. The revolution did not come at once. Avogadro’s hypothesis never affected Bunsen’s teaching; some years were needed before it reached Manchester, and there are still survivals who never have been clear why water should be HO one year and H₂O the next. Bunsen, indeed, used to say that one new chemical fact, even an unimportant one, accurately determined, was worth a whole congress of discussion of matters of theory. The truth was Roscoe, in chemistry as in other matters, was primarily a man of action: he was essentially an “experimentarian philosopher,” as Hobbes sneeringly dubbed the whole of the Fellows of the Royal Society. A fact absolutely ascertained was a definite and permanent addition to knowledge; hypotheses and theories were transitory and mutable; they have their day and cease to be.
But it would be unjust and untrue to assume that Roscoe set no value on theory: he fully recognized that she was the handmaid of Science. He who had so carefully studied Dalton’s papers and followed the workings of his mind in the light of a century’s experience, could not be unmindful of the worth of a fruitful conception. Mendelejeff’s generalization when it was first promulgated at once attracted him, and he followed its startling verifications with the greatest interest. It was always a matter of gratification that his detection of the true relations of vanadium to the other elements, just prior to the announcement of the Law of Periodicity, should have removed at least what would have been one apparent exception to the universality of its truth.
When Roscoe first settled in Manchester he lived with his mother in the house which had been occupied by his predecessor, the late Sir Edward Frankland. On his marriage he moved to Victoria Park, and subsequently, after the birth of his children, to a larger residence which was built for him in the same neighbourhood. It was a charming, well-arranged house surrounded by a good-sized garden, and with an excellent tennis lawn, to which his colleagues and senior students were freely invited on half-holidays during the summer months. In those days Roscoe was an active player, his reach and length of stride making him a formidable opponent. Both he and Lady Roscoe were fond of horses, and for some years riding in company with her was his usual form of outdoor exercise. Occasionally they would plan a driving tour together, and considerable sections of England and Wales were explored in this way. Whilst his children were young his long vacations were usually spent in the Lakes or in Scotland, or at Mr. Edmund Potter’s country seat, Camfield Place, near Hatfield. Roscoe’s long vacations usually meant to him either a change of occupation, or the continuance of a piece of literary work in new surroundings. Many of his memoirs were, in fact, put together during his vacations: it was only at such periods, when, free from the routine of lecturing, laboratory superintendence and College committees, that he could count upon the necessary freedom from interruption to arrange the results of an inquiry. The compilation of his smaller text-books was usually done at such times. The large treatise which he wrote with Schorlemmer, and which necessarily needed ready access to a library rich in serial publications, was mainly composed in Manchester. At one period of his career he was a frequent contributor to certain of the quarterly reviews, and the early volumes of Nature contain occasional communications from his pen. It was a point of honour to translate any paper of Bunsen’s for the Philosophical Magazine.