Ivan Turgenev - "A House of Gentlefolk"

Will Levington Comfort - "Red Fleece"

Saki - "The Unbearable Bassington"

Louisa May Alcott - "Little Men: Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys"

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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




My dear Hooker,

What with one thing and another, I have almost forgotten to answer your
note--and first, as to the business matter...Next as to my own private
affairs, the youngster is "a swelling wisibly," and my wife is getting
on better than I hoped, though not quite so well as I could have wished.
The boy's advent is a great blessing to her in all ways. For myself I
hardly know yet whether it is pleasure or pain. The ground has gone from
under my feet once, and I hardly know how to rest on anything again.
Irrational, you will say, but nevertheless natural. And finally as to
your resolutions, my holy pilgrim, they will be kept about as long as
the resolutions of other anchorites who are thrown into the busy world,
or I won't say that, for assuredly you will take the world "as coolly as
you can," and so shall I. But that coolness amounts to the red heat of
properly constructed mortals.

It is no use having any false modesty about the matter. You and I, if we
last ten years longer, and you by a long while first, will be the
representatives of our respective lines in this country. In that
capacity we shall have certain duties to perform to ourselves, to the
outside world, and to science. We shall have to swallow praise which is
no great pleasure, and to stand multitudinous basting and irritations,
which will involve a good deal of unquestionable pain. Don't flatter
yourself that there is any moral chloroform by which either you or I can
render ourselves insensible or acquire the habit of doing things coolly.
It is assuredly of no great use to tear one's self to pieces before one
is fifty. But the alternative, for men constructed on the high pressure
tubular boiler principle, like ourselves, is to lie still and let the
devil have his own way. And I will be torn to pieces before I am forty
sooner than see that.

I have been privately trading on my misfortunes in order to get a little
peace and quietness for a few months. If I can help it I don't mean to
do any dining out this winter, and I have cut down Societies to the
minimum of the Geological, from which I cannot get away.

But it won't do to keep this up too long. By and by one must drift into
the stream again, and then there is nothing for it but to pull like mad
unless we want to be run down by every collier.

I am going to do one sensible thing, however, viz. to rush down to
Llanberis with Busk between Christmas Day and New Year's Day and get my
lungs full of hill-air for the coming session.

I was at Down on Saturday and saw Darwin. He seems fairly well, and his
daughter was up and looks better than I expected to see her.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Meanwhile, he took the opportunity to make the child's birth a new link
with his old friend, and wrote as follows :--]

14 Waverley Place, January 3, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

If I had nothing else to write about I must wish you a Happy New Year
and many on 'em; but, in fact, my wife and I have a great favour to ask
of you, which is neither more nor less than to stand godfather for our
little son. You know my opinions on these matters, and I would not ask
you to do anything I would not do myself, so if you consent, the clerk
shall tell all the lies for you, and you shall be asked to do nothing
else than to help devour the christening feed, and be as good a friend
to the boy as you have been to his father.

My wife will have the youngster christened, although I am always in a
bad temper from the time it is talked about until the ceremony is over.
The only way of turning the farce into a reality is by making it an
extra bond with one's friends. On the other hand, if you have any
objection to say, "all this I steadfastly believe," even by deputy, I
know you will have no hesitation in saying so, and in giving me as frank
a refusal as my request. [As against his dislike of consenting to a
rite, to him meaningless, he was moved by a feeling which in part
corresponded to Descartes' morale par provision,--in part was an
acknowledgment of the possibilities of individual development, making it
only fair to a child to give it a connection with the official spiritual
organisation of its country, which it could either ignore or continue on
reaching intellectual maturity.]

Let me know if you have any fault to find with the new "Review." I think
you will see it would have been a dreadful business to translate all the
German titles in the bibliography. I returned from a ramble about
Snowdon with Busk and Tyndall on the 31st, all the better. My wife is
decidedly improved, though she mends but slowly.

Our best wishes to you and all yours.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

Any fragments from the rich man's table for the next Number of "N.H.R.?"

14 Waverley Place, January 6, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

My wife and I were very pleased to get your hearty and kind acceptance
of Godfathership. We shall not call upon you for some time, I fancy, as
the mistress doesn't get strong very fast. However, I am only glad she
is well as she is. She came down yesterday for the first time.

It is very pleasant to get such expressions of opinion as I have had
from you, Lyell, and Darwin about the "Review." They make me quite
hopeful about its prosperity, as I am sure we shall be able to do better
than our first number.

I am glad you liked what I said in the opening of my article. [(In the
"Natural History Review" 1861 page 67--]"The proof of his claim to
independent parentage will not change the brutishness of man's lower
nature; nor, except in those valet souls who cannot see greatness in
their fellow because his father was a cobbler, will the demonstration of
a pithecoid pedigree one whit diminish man's divine right of kingship
over nature; nor lower the great and princely dignity of perfect
manhood, which is an order of nobility not inherited, but to be won by
each of us, so far as he consciously seeks good and avoids evil, and
puts the faculties with which he is endowed to their fittest use.") I
wish not to be in any way confounded with the cynics who delight in
degrading man, or with the common run of materialists, who think mind is
any the lower for being a function of matter. I dislike them even more
than I do the pietists.

Some of these days I shall look up the ape question again, and go over
the rest of the organisation in the same way. But in order to get a
thorough grip of the question, I must examine into a good many points
for myself. The results, when they do come out, will, I foresee,
astonish the natives.

I am cold-proof, and all the better for the Welsh trip. To say truth, I
was just on the edge of breaking down when I went. Did I ever send you a
letter of mine on the teaching of Natural History? It was published
while you were away, and I forget whether I sent it or not. However, a
copy accompanies this note...

Of course there will be room for your review and welcome. I have put it
down and reckon on it.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Huxley returned from the trip to Wales in time to be with his wife for
the New Year. The plot she had made with Dr. Tyndall had been entirely
successful. The threatened breakdown was averted. Wales in winter was as
good as Switzerland. Of the ascent of Snowdon he writes on December 28:]
"Both Tyndall and I voted it under present circumstances as good as most
things Alpine."

[His wife, however, continued in very weak health. She was prostrated by
the loss of her little boy. So in the middle of March he gladly accepted
Mr. Darwin's invitation for her and the three children to spend a
fortnight in the quiet of his house at Down, where he himself managed to
run down for a week end.] "It appears to me," [he writes to his wife,]
"that you are subjecting poor Darwin to a savage Tennysonian
persecution. I shall see him looking like a martyr and across talk
double science next Sunday."

[In April another good friend, Dr. Bence Jones, lent the invalid his
house at Folkestone for three months. Unable even to walk when she went
there, her recovery was a slow business. Huxley ran down every week; his
brother George and his wife also were frequent visitors. Meanwhile he
resolved to move into a new house, in order that she might not return to
a place so full of sorrowful memories. On May 30 he effected the move to
a larger house not half a mile away from Waverley Place--26 Abbey Place
(now 23 Abercorn Place). Here also Mrs. Heathorn lived for the next
year, my grandfather, over seventy as he was, being compelled to go out
again to Australia to look after a business venture of his which had
come to grief.

Meantime the old house was still on his hands for another year. Trying
to find a tenant, he writes on May 21, 1861:--]

I met J. Tyndall at Ramsay's last night, and I think he is greatly
inclined to have the house. I gave him your message and found that a
sneaking kindness for the old house actuated him a good deal in wishing
to take it. It is not a bad fellow, and we won't do him much on the
fixtures.

[Eventually Tyndall and his friend Hirst established themselves there.

This spring Professor Henslow, Mrs. Hooker's father, a botanist of the
first rank, and a man extraordinarily beloved by all who came in contact
with him, was seized with a mortal illness, and lingered on without hope
of recovery through almost the whole of April. Huxley writes:--]

Jermyn Street, April 4, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

I am very much grieved and shocked by your letter. The evening before
last I heard from Busk that your father-in-law had been ill, and that
you had been to see him, and I meant to have written to you yesterday to
inquire, but it was driven out of my head by people coming here. And
then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the
Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. God knows, I
feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a
mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture
to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by
the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great
acquirements, and that great calm catholic judgment and sense which
always seemed to me more prominent in him than in any man I ever knew.

He had intellect to comprehend his highest duty distinctly, and force of
character to do it; which of us dare ask for a higher summary of his
life than that? For such a man there can be no fear in facing the great
unknown, his life has been one long experience of the substantial
justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly
trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep.

You know all these things as well as I do, and I know as well as you do
that such thoughts do not cure heartache or assuage grief. Such
maladies, when men are as old as you and I are, are apt to hang about
one a long time, but I find that if they are faced and accepted as part
of our fair share of life, a great deal of good is to be got out of
them. You will find that too, but in the meanwhile don't go and break
yourself down with over wear and tear. The heaviest pull comes after the
excitement of a catastrophe of this kind is over.

Believe in my affectionate sympathy with you, and that I am, my dear old
fellow, yours ever,

T.H. Huxley.

[And again on the 18th:--]

Many thanks for your two letters. It would be sad to hear of life
dragging itself out so painfully and slowly, if it were not for what you
tell me of the calmness and wisdom with which the poor sufferer uses
such strength as is left him.

One can express neither wish nor hope in such a case. With such a man
what is will be well. All I have to repeat is, don't knock yourself up.
I wish to God I could help you in some way or other beyond repeating the
parrot cry. If I can, of course you will let me know.

[In June 1861 a jotting in his notebook records that he is at work on
the chick's skull, part of the embryological work which he took up
vigorously at this time, and at once the continuation of his researches
on the Vertebrate Skull, embodied in his Croonian lecture of 1858, and
the beginning of a long series of investigations into the structure of
birds. There is a reference to this in a very interesting letter dealing
chiefly with what he conceived to be the cardinal point of the Darwinian
theory:--]

26 Abbey Place, September 4, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

Yesterday being the first day I went to the Athenaeum after reading your
note, I had a look at, and a good laugh over, the "Quarterly" article.
Who can be the writer?

I have been so busy studying chicken development, a difficult subject to
which I had long ago made up my mind to devote my first spare time, that
I have written you no word about your article in the "Gardener's
Chronicle." I quite agree with the general tendency of your argument,
though it seems to me that you put your view rather too strongly when
you seem to question the position "that, as a rule, resemblances prevail
over differences" between parent and offspring. Surely, as a rule,
resemblances DO prevail over differences, though I quite agree with you
that the latter have been far too much overlooked. The great desideratum
for the species question at present seems to me to be the determination
of the law of variation. Because no law has yet been made out, Darwin is
obliged to speak of variation as if it were spontaneous or a matter of
chance, so that the bishops and superior clergy generally (the only real
atheists and believers in chance left in the world) gird at him as if he
were another Lucretius.

It is [in] the recognition of a tendency to variation apart from the
variation of what are ordinarily understood as external conditions that
Darwin's view is such an advance on Lamarck. Why does not somebody go to
work experimentally, and get at the law of variation for some one
species of plant?

What a capital article that was in the "Athenaeum" the other day apud
the Schlagintweits. [The brothers Schlagintweit (four of whom were
ultimately employed), who had gained some reputation for their work on
the Physical Geography of the Alps, were, on Humboldt's recommendation,
despatched by the East India Company in 1854-55-56 to the Deccan, and
especially to the Himalayan region (where they were the first Europeans
to cross the Kuenlun Mountains), in order to correlate the instruments
and observations of the several magnetic surveys of India. But they
enlarged the scope of their mission by professing to correct the great
trigonometrical survey, while the contract with them was so loosely
drawn up that they had practically a roving commission in science, to
make researches and publish the results--up to nine volumes--in all
manner of subjects, which in fact ranged from the surveying work to
ethnology, and were crowned by an additional volume on Buddhism! The
original cost to the Indian Government was estimated at 15 thousand
pounds sterling; the allowances from the English Government during the
inordinately prolonged period of arranging and publishing materials,
including payment for sixty copies of each volume, atlas, and so forth,
as well as personal payments, came to as much more.

Unfortunately the results were of less value than was expected. The
attempt to correct the work done with the large instruments of the
trigonometrical survey by means of far smaller instruments was absurd;
away from the ground covered by the great survey the figures proved to
be very inaccurate. The most annoying part of the affair was that it
absorbed the State aid which might have been given to more valuable
researches.

The Council of the Royal Society had been consulted as to the
advisability of despatching this expedition and opposed it, for there
were in the service of the Company not a few men admirably qualified for
the duty, whose scientific services had received scant appreciation.
Nevertheless, the expedition started after all, with the approval of
Colonel Sabine, the president. In the last months of 1866, Huxley drew
up for the Royal Society a report upon the scientific value of the
results of the expedition.] Don Roderigo is very wroth at being made
responsible with Sabine, and indeed I think he had little enough to do
with it.

You will see a letter from him in this week's "Athenaeum."

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.


CHAPTER 1.17.

1861-1863.

[It has been seen that the addition of journalistic work in science to
the mass of original research and teaching work upon which Huxley was
engaged, called forth a remonstrance from both Lyell and Darwin. To
Hooker it seemed still more serious that he was dividing his allegiance,
and going far afield in philosophy, instead of concentrating himself
upon natural science. He writes:--

I am sorry to hear that you are so poorly, and wish I could help you to
sit down and work quietly at pure science. You have got into a
whirlpool, and should stroke vigorously at the proper angle, not attempt
to breast the whole force of the current, nor yet give in to it. Do take
the counsel of a quiet looker on and withdraw to your books and studies
in pure Natural History; let modes of thought alone. You may make a very
good naturalist, or a very good metaphysician (of that I know nothing,
don't despise me), but you have neither time nor place for both.

However, it must be remarked that this love of philosophy, not recently
acquired either, was only part of the passion for general principles
underlying the facts of science which had always possessed him. And the
time expended upon it was not directly taken from the hours of
scientific work; he would read in bed through the small hours of the
night, when sleep was slow in coming to him. In this way he got through
an immense amount of philosophy in the course of several years. Not that
he could "state the views of so and so" upon any given question, or
desired such kind of knowledge; he wished to find out and compare with
his own the answers which other thinkers gave to the problems which
interested himself.

A gentler reproof of this time touches his handwriting, which was never
of the most legible, so that his foreign correspondents in particular
sometimes complained. Haeckel used to get his difficulties deciphered by
his colleague Gegenbaur. I cannot forbear quoting the delicate
remonstrance of Professor Lacaze du Thiers, and the flattering remedy he
proposed:--

March 14.

Je lis l'Anglais imprime, mais vos ecritures anglaises sont si rapides,
qu'il m'est quelquefois difficile de m'en sortir. On me dit que vous
ecrivez si bien le francais que je crois que je vous lirais bien mieux
dans ma langue!

On his return from examining at Dublin, he again looked over proofs for
Mr. Spencer.]

Jermyn Street, August 3, 1861.

My dear Spencer,

I have been absent on a journey to Dublin and elsewhere [Visiting Sir
Philip Egerton at Oulton Park.] nearly all this week, and hence your
note and proof did not reach me till yesterday. I have but just had time
to glance through the latter, and I need hardly say how heartily I
concur in its general tenor. I have, however, marked one or two passages
which I think require some qualification. Then, at page 272, the fact
that the vital manifestations of plants depend as entirely as those of
animals upon the fall towards stable equilibrium of the elements of a
complex protein compound is not sufficiently prominent. It is not so
much that plants are deoxidisers and animals oxidisers, as that plants
are manufacturers and animals consumers. It is true that plants
manufacture a good deal of non-nitrogenous produce in proportion to the
nitrogenous, but it is the latter which is chiefly useful to the animal
consumer and not the former. This point is a very important one, which I
have never seen clearly and distinctly put--the prettiness of Dumas'
circulation of the elements having seduced everybody.

Of course this in no way affects the principle of what you say. The
statements which I have marked at page 276 and 278 should have their
authorities given, I think. I should hardly like to commit myself to
them absolutely.

You will, if my memory does not mislead me, find authority for my note
at page 283 in Stephenson's life. I think old George Stephenson brought
out his views at breakfast at Sir R. Peel's when Buckland was there.

These are all the points that strike me, and I do not keep your proof
any longer (I send it by the same post as this note), because I fear you
may be inconvenienced by the delay.

Tyndall is unfortunately gone to Switzerland, so that I cannot get you
his comments. Whether he might have picked holes in any detail or not I
do not know, but I know his opinions sufficiently well to make sure in
his agreement with the general argument. In fact a favourite problem of
his is--Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or
Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will
solve this easily.

I am grieved to hear such a poor account of your health; I believe you
will have to come at last to the heroic remedy of matrimony, and if
"gynopathy" were a mode of treatment that could be left off if it did
not suit the constitution, I should decidedly recommend it.

But it's worse than opium-eating--once begun and you must go on, and so,
though I ascribe my own good condition mainly to the care my wife takes
of me, I dare not recommend it to you, lest perchance you should get
hold of the wrong medicine.

Beyond spending a night awake now and then I am in very good order, and
I am going to spend my vacation in a spasmodic effort to lick the
"Manual" into shape and work off some other arrears.

My wife is very fairly well, and, I trust, finally freed from all the
symptoms which alarmed me so much. I dread the coming round of September
for her again, but it must be faced.

The babbies are flourishing; and beyond the facts that we have a lunatic
neighbour on one side and an empty house on the other, that it has cost
me about twice as much to get into my house as I expected, that the
cistern began to leak and spoil a ceiling, and such other small
drawbacks, the new house is a decided success.

I forget whether I gave you the address, which is--

26 Abbey Place, St. John's Wood.

You had better direct to me there, as after the 10th of this month I
shall not be here for six weeks.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[October shows an unusual entry in his diary; the sacrifice of a working
evening to hear Jenny Lind sing. Fond though he was of music, as those
may remember who ever watched his face at the Sunday evening gatherings
in Marlborough Place in the later seventies, when there was sure to be
at least a little good music or singing either from his daughters or
some of the guests, he seldom could spare the time for concert-going or
theatre-going, and the occasional notes of his bachelor days, "to the
opera with Spencer," had ceased as his necessary occupations grew more
engrossing.

This year his friend Hooker moved to Kew to act as second in command to
his father, Sir William Hooker, the director of the Botanical Gardens.
This move made meetings between the two friends, except at clubs and
societies, more difficult, and was one of the immediate causes of the
foundation of the x Club. It is this move which is referred to in the
following letters; the "poor client" being the wife of an old messmate
of his on the "Rattlesnake":--]

Jermyn Street, November 17.

My dear Hooker,

My wife wrote to yours yesterday, the enclosed note explaining the
kitchen-revolution which, it seems, must delay our meeting. When she had
done, however, she did not know where to direct it, and I am no wiser,
so I send it to you.

It's a horrid nuisance and I have sworn a few, but that will not cook
the dinner, however much it may prepare me for being cooked elsewhere.
To complete my disgust at things in general, my wife is regularly
knocked up with dining out twice this week, though it was only in the
quietest way. I shall have to lock her up altogether.

X-- has made a horrid mess of it, and I am sorry to say, from what I
know of him, that I cannot doubt where the fault lies. The worst of it
is that he has a wife and three children over here, left without a penny
or any means of support. The poor woman wrote to me the other day, and
when I went to see her I found her at the last shilling and
contemplating the workhouse as her next step. She has brothers in
Australia, and it appeared to me that the only way to do her any good
was to get her out. She cannot starve there, and there will be more hope
for her children than an English poor-house. I am going to see if the
Emigration Commissioners will do anything for her, as of course it is
desirable to cut down the cost of exportation to the smallest amount.

It is most lamentable that a man of so much ability should have so
utterly damned himself as X-- has, but he is hopelessly Celtic.

I shall be at the Phil. Club next Thursday.