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Books: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1

L >> Leonard Huxley >> The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1



Produced by Sue Asscher asschers@bigpond.com






LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

BY HIS SON

LEONARD HUXLEY.



IN THREE VOLUMES.


VOLUME 1.




PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

The American edition of the "Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley"
calls for a few words by way of preface, for there existed a particular
relationship between the English writer and his transatlantic readers.

From the time that his "Lay Sermons" was published his essays found in
the United States an eager audience, who appreciated above all things
his directness and honesty of purpose and the unflinching spirit in
which he pursued the truth. Whether or not, as some affirm, the American
public "discovered" Mr. Herbert Spencer, they responded at once to the
influence of the younger evolutionary writer, whose wide and exact
knowledge of nature was but a stepping-stone to his interest in human
life and its problems. And when, a few years later, after more than one
invitation, he came to lecture in the United States and made himself
personally known to his many readers, it was this widespread response to
his influence which made his welcome comparable, as was said at the
time, to a royal progress.

His own interest in the present problems of the country and the
possibilities of its future was always keen, not merely as touching the
development of a vast political force--one of the dominant factors of
the near future--but far more as touching the character of its
approaching greatness. Huge territories and vast resources were of small
interest to him in comparison with the use to which they should be put.
None felt more vividly than he that the true greatness of a nation would
depend upon the spirit of the principles it adopted, upon the character
of the individuals who make up the nation and shape the channels in
which the currents of its being will hereafter flow.

This was the note he struck in the appeal for intellectual sincerity and
clearness which he made at the end of his New York "Lectures on
Evolution." The same note dominates that letter to his sister--a
Southerner by adoption--which gives his reading of the real issue at
stake in the great civil war. Slavery is bad for the slave, but far
worse for the master, as sapping his character and making impossible
that moral vigour of the individual on which is based the collective
vigour of the nation.

The interest with which he followed the later development of social
problems need not be dwelt on here, except to say that he watched their
earlier maturity in America as an indication of the problems which would
afterwards call for a solution in his own country. His share in treating
them was limited to examining the principles of social philosophy on
which some of the proposed remedies for social troubles were based, and
this examination may be found in his "Collected Essays." But the
educational campaign which he carried on in England had its counterpart
in America. It was not only that he was chosen to open the Johns Hopkins
University as the type of a new form of education; there and elsewhere
pupils of his carried out in America his methods of teaching biology,
while others engaged in general education would write testifying to the
influence of his ideas upon their own methods of teaching. But it must
be remembered that nothing was further from his mind than the desire to
found a school of thought. He only endeavoured as a scholar and a
student to clear up his own thoughts and help others to clear theirs,
whether in the intellectual or the moral world. This was the help he
steadfastly hoped to give the people, that interacting union of
intellectual freedom and moral discernment which may be furthered by
good education and training, by precept and example, that basis of all
social health and prosperity. And if, as he said, he would like to be
remembered as one who had done his best to help the people, he meant
assuredly not the people only of his native land, but the wider world to
whom his words could be carried.


PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION.

My father's life was one of so many interests, and his work was at all
times so diversified, that to follow each thread separately, as if he
had been engaged on that alone for a time, would be to give a false
impression of his activity and the peculiar character of his labours.
All through his active career he was equally busy with research into
nature, with studies in philosophy, with teaching and administrative
work. The real measure of his energy can only be found when all these
are considered together. Without this there can be no conception of the
limitations imposed upon him in his chosen life's work. The mere amount
of his research is greatly magnified by the smallness of the time
allowed for it.

But great as was the impression left by these researches in purely
scientific circles, it is not by them alone that he made his impression
upon the mass of his contemporaries. They were chiefly moved by
something over and above his wide knowledge in so many fields--by his
passionate sincerity, his interest not only in pure knowledge, but in
human life, by his belief that the interpretation of the book of nature
was not to be kept apart from the ultimate problems of existence; by the
love of truth, in short, both theoretical and practical, which gave the
key to the character of the man himself.

Accordingly, I have not discussed with any fulness the value of his
technical contributions to natural science; I have not drawn up a
compendium of his philosophical views. One is a work for specialists;
the other can be gathered from his published works. I have endeavoured
rather to give the public a picture, so far as I can, of the man
himself, of his aims in the many struggles in which he was engaged, of
his character and temperament, and the circumstances under which his
various works were begun and completed.

So far as possible, I have made his letters, or extracts from them, tell
the story of his life. If those of any given period are diverse in tone
and character, it is simply because they reflect an equal diversity of
occupations and interests. Few of the letters, however, are of any great
length; many are little more than hurried notes; others, mainly of
private interest, supply a sentence here and there to fill in the
general outline.

Moreover, whenever circumstances permit, I have endeavoured to make my
own part in the book entirely impersonal. My experience is that the
constant iteration by the biographer of his relationship to the subject
of his memoir, can become exasperating to the reader; so that at the
risk of offending in the opposite direction, I have chosen the other
course.

Lastly, I have to express my grateful thanks to all who have sent me
letters or supplied information, and especially to Dr. J.H. Gladstone,
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, Professor Howes, Professor Henry Sidgwick,
and Sir Spencer Walpole, for their contributions to the book; but above
all to Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Michael Foster, whose invaluable help
in reading proofs and making suggestions has been, as it were, a final
labour of love for the memory of their old friend.





CONTENTS.


PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.


PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION.


CHAPTER 1.1. 1825-1842.


CHAPTER 1.2. 1841-1846.


CHAPTER 1.3. 1846-1849.


CHAPTER 1.4. 1848-1850.


CHAPTER 1.5. 1850-1851.


CHAPTER 1.6. 1851-1854.


CHAPTER 1.7. 1851-1853.


CHAPTER 1.8. 1854.


CHAPTER 1.9. 1855.


CHAPTER 1.10. 1855-1858.


CHAPTER 1.11. 1857-1858.


CHAPTER 1.12. 1859-1860.


CHAPTER 1.13. 1859.


CHAPTER 1.14. 1859-1860.


CHAPTER 1.15. 1860-1863.


CHAPTER 1.16. 1860-1861.


CHAPTER 1.17. 1861-1863.


CHAPTER 1.18. 1864.


CHAPTER 1.19. 1865.


CHAPTER 1.20. 1866.


CHAPTER 1.21. 1867.


CHAPTER 1.22. 1868.


CHAPTER 1.23. 1869.



...


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PLATE 1. PORTRAIT OF T.H. HUXLEY FROM A DAGUERROTYPE MADE IN 1846.

PLATE 2. FACSIMILE OF SKETCH, "THE LOVES AND GRACES."

PLATE 3. PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY MAULL AND POLYBLANK, 1857.

PLATE 4. NUMBER 4 MARLBOROUGH PLACE--FROM THE GARDEN. AFTER A
WATERCOLOUR SKETCH BY R. HUXLEY.

PLATE 5. PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ELLIOTT AND FRY; STEEL ENGRAVING
IN "NATURE," FEBRUARY 5, 1874.


CHAPTER 1.1.

1825-1842.

[In the year 1825 Ealing was as quiet a country village as could be
found within a dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Here stood a large
semi-public school, which had risen to the front rank in numbers and
reputation under Dr. Nicholas, of Wadham College, Oxford, who in 1791
became the son-in-law and successor of the previous master.

The senior assistant-master in this school was George Huxley, a tall,
dark, rather full-faced man, quick tempered, and distinguished, in his
son's words, by "that glorious firmness which one's enemies called
obstinacy." In the year 1810 he had married Rachel Withers; she bore
five sons and three daughters, of whom one son and one daughter died in
infancy; the seventh and youngest surviving child was Thomas Henry.

George Huxley, the master at Ealing, was the second son of Thomas Huxley
and Margaret James, who were married at St. Michael's, Coventry, on
September 8, 1773. This Thomas Huxley continued to live at Coventry
until his death in January 1796, when he left behind him a large family
and no very great wealth. The most notable item in the latter is the
"capital Messuage, by me lately purchased of Mrs. Ann Thomas," which he
directs to be sold to pay his debts--an inn, apparently, for the
testator is described as a victualler. Family tradition tells that he
came to Coventry from Lichfield, and if so, he and his sons after him
exemplify the tendency to move south, which is to be observed in those
of the same name who migrated from their original home in Cheshire. This
home is represented to-day by a farm in the Wirral, about eight miles
from Chester, called Huxley Hall. From this centre Huxleys spread to the
neighbouring villages, such as Overton and Eccleston, Clotton and
Duddon, Tattenhall and Wettenhall; others to Chester and Brindley near
Nantwich. The southward movement carries some to the Welsh border,
others into Shropshire. The Wettenhall family established themselves in
the fourth generation at Rushall, and held property in Handsworth and
Walsall; the Brindley family sent a branch to Macclesfield, whose
representative, Samuel, must have been on the town council when the
Young Pretender rode through on his way to Derby, for he was mayor in
1746; while at the end of the sixteenth century, George, the
disinherited heir of Brindley, became a merchant in London, and
purchased Wyre Hall at Edmonton, where his descendants lived for four
generations, his grandson being knighted by Charles II in 1663.

But my father had no particular interest in tracing his early ancestry.
"My own genealogical inquiries," he said, "have taken me so far back
that I confess the later stages do not interest me." Towards the end of
his life, however, my mother persuaded him to see what could be found
out about Huxley Hall and the origin of the name. This proved to be from
the manor of Huxley or Hodesleia, whereof one Swanus de Hockenhull was
enfeoffed by the abbot and convent of St. Werburgh in the time of
Richard I. Of the grandsons of this Swanus, the eldest kept the manor
and name of Hockenhull (which is still extant in the Midlands); the
younger ones took their name from the other fief.

But the historian of Cheshire records the fact that owing to the
respectability of the name, it was unlawfully assumed by divers "losels
and lewd fellows of the baser sort," and my father, with a fine show of
earnestness, used to declare that he was certain the legitimate owners
of the name were far too sober and respectable to have produced such a
reprobate as himself, and one of these "losels" must be his progenitor.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, "about eight
o'clock in the morning." (So in the Autobiography, but 9.30 according to
the Family Bible.) "I am not aware," he tells us playfully in his
Autobiography, "that any portents preceded my arrival in this world,
but, in my childhood, I remember hearing a traditional account of the
manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great practical
value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in consequence of the
unusual warmth of the weather. For the same reason, probably, a
neighbouring beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the
window-sill, was making its way into the room when the horrified nurse
shut down the sash. If that well-meaning woman had only abstained from
her ill-timed interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and
I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in
this country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or honest
work, to the highest places in Church and State. But the opportunity was
lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying
what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose,
there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement."

As to his debt, physical and mental, to either parent, he writes as
follows:--]

Physically I am the son of my mother so completely--even down to
peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I
reached the age she had when I noticed them--that I can hardly find any
trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing,
which, unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot
temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly
observers sometimes call obstinacy.

My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic
temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in
a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the middle
classes of her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most
distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one
ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive at any
conclusion, she would say, "I cannot help it; things flash across me."
That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often
stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it
has always been a danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over
again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my
inheritance of mother-wit.

[Restless, talkative, untiring to the day of her death, she was at
sixty-six "as active and energetic as a young woman." His early devotion
to her was remarkable. Describing her to his future wife he writes:--]

As a child my love for her was a passion. I have lain awake for hours
crying because I had a morbid fear of her death; her approbation was my
greatest reward, her displeasure my greatest punishment.

I have next to nothing to say about my childhood (he continues in the
Autobiography). In later years my mother, looking at me almost
reproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah! you were such a pretty boy!"
whence I had no difficulty in concluding that I had not fulfilled my
early promise in the matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinct
recollection of certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction
that I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert
Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a god to us country
folk, because he was occasionally visited by the then Prince George of
Cambridge. I remember turning my pinafore wrong side forwards in order
to represent a surplice, and preaching to my mother's maids in the
kitchen as nearly as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning
when the rest of the family were at church. That is the earliest
indication of the strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Herbert
Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have for the most
part remained in a latent state.

[There remains no record of his having been a very precocious child.
Indeed, it is usually the eldest child whose necessary companionship
with his elders wins him this reputation. The youngest remains a child
among children longer than any other of his brothers and sisters.

One talent, however, displayed itself early. The faculty of drawing he
inherited from his father. But on the queer principle that training is
either unnecessary to natural capacity or even ruins it, he never
received regular instruction in drawing; and his draughtsmanship,
vigorous as it was, and a genuine medium of artistic expression as well
as an admirable instrument in his own especial work, never reached the
technical perfection of which it was naturally capable.

The amount of instruction, indeed of any kind, which he received was
scanty in the extreme. For a couple of years, from the age of eight to
ten, he was given a taste of the unreformed public school life, where,
apart from the rough and ready mode of instruction in vogue and the
necessary obedience enforced to certain rules, no means were taken to
reach the boys themselves, to guide them and help them in their school
life. The new-comer was left to struggle for himself in a community
composed of human beings at their most heartlessly cruel age, untempered
by any external influence.

Here he had little enough of mental discipline, or that deliberate
training of character which is a leading object of modern education. On
the contrary, what he learnt was a knowledge of undisciplined human
nature.]

My regular school training [he tells us], was of the briefest, perhaps
fortunately; for though my way of life has made me acquainted with all
sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the lowest, I
deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at school was the worst
I have ever known. We boys were average lads, with much the same
inherent capacity for good and evil as any others; but the people who
were set over us cared about as much for our intellectual and moral
welfare as if they were baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of
the struggle for existence among ourselves; bullying was the least of
the ill practices current among us. Almost the only cheerful
reminiscence in connection with the place which arises in my mind is
that of a battle I had with one of my classmates, who had bullied me
until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was
a wild-cat element in me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight,
and I licked my adversary effectually. However, one of my first
experiences of the extremely rough-and-ready nature of justice, as
exhibited by the course of things in general, arose out of the fact that
I--the victor--had a black eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so
that I got into disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and thereafter I
was unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life
was to be told a dozen years afterwards by the groom who brought me my
horse in a stable-yard in Sydney that he was my quondam antagonist. He
had a long story of family misfortune to account for his position; but
at that time it was necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious
strangers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that the
unfortunate young man had not only been "sent out," but had undergone
more than one colonial conviction.

[His brief school career was happily cut short by the break up of the
Ealing establishment. On the death of Dr. Nicholas, his sons attempted
to carry on the school; but the numbers declined rapidly, and George
Huxley, about 1835, returned to his native town of Coventry, where he
obtained the modest post of manager of the Coventry savings bank, while
his daughters eked out the slender family resources by keeping school.

In the meantime the boy Tom, as he was usually called, got little or no
regular instruction. But he had an inquiring mind, and a singularly
early turn for metaphysical speculation. He read everything he could lay
hands on in his father's library. Not satisfied with the ordinary length
of the day, he used, when a boy of twelve, to light his candle before
dawn, pin a blanket round his shoulders, and sit up in bed to read
Hutton's "Geology." He discussed all manner of questions with his
parents and friends, for his quick and eager mind made it possible for
him to have friendships with people considerably older than himself.
Among these may especially be noted his medical brother-in-law, Dr.
Cooke of Coventry, who had married his sister Ellen in 1839, and through
whom he early became interested in human anatomy; and George Anderson
May, at that time in business at Hinckley (a small weaving centre some
dozen miles distant from Coventry), whom his friends who knew him
afterwards in the home which he made for himself on the farm at Elford,
near Tamworth, will remember for his genial spirit and native love of
letters. There was a real friendship between the two. The boy of fifteen
notes down with pleasure his visits to the man of six-and-twenty, with
whom he could talk freely of the books he read, and the ideas he
gathered about philosophy.

Afterwards, however, their ways lay far apart, and I believe they did
not meet again until the seventies, when Mr. May sent his children to be
educated in London, and his youngest son was at school with me; his
younger daughter studied art at the Slade school with my sisters, and
both found a warm welcome in the home circle at Marlborough Place.

One of his boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if
their qualities were taken away; and lighting upon Sir William
Hamilton's "Logic," he devoured it to such good effect that when, years
afterwards, he came to tackle the greater philosophers, especially the
English and the German, he found he had already a clear notion of where
the key of metaphysic lay.

This early interest in metaphysics was another form of the intense
curiosity to discover the motive principle of things, the why and how
they act, that appeared in the boy's love of engineering and of anatomy.
The unity of this motive and the accident which bade fair to ruin his
life at the outset, and actually levied a lifelong tax upon his bodily
vigour, are best told in his own words:--]

As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical engineer, but
the fates were against this, and while very young I commenced the study
of medicine under a medical brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of
Mechanical Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I
have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer in partibus
infidelium. I am now occasionally horrified to think how little I ever
knew or cared about medicine as the art of healing. The only part of my
professional course which really and deeply interested me was
physiology, which is the mechanical engineering of living machines; and,
notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper business, I am
afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never
collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I
cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business,
the working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and
thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of
similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends. The extraordinary attraction
I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living structure nearly
proved fatal to me at the outset. I was a mere boy--I think between
thirteen and fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older
student friends of mine to the first post-mortem examination I ever
attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive to the
disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on this occasion my
curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two or three hours
in gratifying it. I did not cut myself, and none of the ordinary
symptoms of dissection-poison supervened, but poisoned I was somehow,
and I remember sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last
chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of my
father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwickshire. I
remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring
morning after my arrival, and throwing open the casement. Life seemed to
come back on the wings of the breeze, and to this day the faint odour of
wood-smoke, like that which floated across the farmyard in the early
morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of violets." I
soon recovered, but for years I suffered from occasional paroxysms of
internal pain, and from that time my constant friend, hypochondriacal
dyspepsia, commenced his half-century of co-tenancy of my fleshly
tabernacle.

[Some little time after his return from the voyage of the "Rattlesnake,"
Huxley succeeded in tracing his good Warwickshire friends again. A
letter of May 11, 1852, from one of them, Miss K. Jaggard, tells how
they had lost sight of the Huxleys after their departure from Coventry;
how they were themselves dispersed by death, marriage, or retirement;
and then proceeds to draw a lively sketch of the long delicate-looking
lad, which clearly refers to this period or a little later.]