Books: The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3

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On the other hand, intense as was his love of pure knowledge, it was
balanced by his unceasing desire to apply that knowledge in the
guidance of life. Always feeling that science was not solely for the
men of science, but for the people, his constant object was to help the
struggling world to ideas which should help them to think truly and so
to live rightly. It is still true, he declared, that the people perish
for want of knowledge. "If I am to be remembered at all," he writes
(see volume 2), "I should like to be remembered as one who did his best
to help the people." And again, he says in his Autobiographical Sketch,
that other marks of success were as nothing if he could hope that he
"had somewhat helped that movement of opinion which has been called the
New Reformation."

This kind of aim in his work, of taking up the most fruitful idea of
his time and bringing it home to all, is typified by his remark as he
entered New York harbour on his visit to America in 1876, and watched
the tugs hard at work as they traversed the bay.] "If I were not a
man," [he said], "I think I should like to be a tug."

[Two incidents may be cited to show that he did not entirely fail of
appreciation among those whom he tried to help. Speaking of the year
1874, Professor Mivart writes ("Reminiscences of T.H. Huxley,"
"Nineteenth Century", December 1897.)

I recollect going with him and Mr. John Westlake, Q.C., to a meeting of
artisans in the Blackfriars Road, to whom he gave a friendly address.
He felt a strong interest in working-men, and was much beloved by them.
On one occasion, having taken a cab home, on his arrival there, when he
held out his fare to the cabman, the latter replied, "Oh no, Professor,
I have had too much pleasure and profit from hearing you lecture to
take any money from your pocket--proud to have driven you, sir!"

The other is from a letter to the "Pall Mall Gazette" of September 20,
1892, from Mr. Raymond Blaythwayt, on "The Uses of Sentiment":--

Only to-day I had a most striking instance of sentiment come beneath my
notice. I was about to enter my house, when a plain, simply-dressed
working-man came up to me with a note in his hand, and touching his
hat, he said, "I think this is for you, sir," and then he added, "Will
you give me the envelope, sir, as a great favour?" I looked at it, and
seeing it bore the signature of Professor Huxley, I replied, "Certainly
I will; but why do you ask for it?" "Well," said he, "it's got
Professor Huxley's signature, and it will be something for me to show
my mates and keep for my children. He have done me and my like a lot of
good; no man more."

In practical administration, his judgment of men, his rapid perception
of the essential points at issue, his observance of the necessary
limits of official forms, combined with the greatest possible
elasticity within these limits, made him extremely successful.

As Professor (writes the late Professor Jeffery Parker), Huxley's rule
was characterised by what is undoubtedly the best policy for the head
of a department. To a new subordinate, "The General," as he was always
called, was rather stern and exacting, but when once he was convinced
that his man was to be trusted, he practically let him take his own
course; never interfered in matters of detail, accepted suggestions
with the greatest courtesy and good humour, and was always ready with a
kindly and humorous word of encouragement in times of difficulty. I was
once grumbling to him about how hard it was to carry on the work of the
laboratory through a long series of November fogs, "when neither sun
nor stars in many days appeared."] "Never mind, Parker," [he said,
instantly capping my quotation], "cast four anchors out of the stern
and wish for day."

[Nothing, indeed, better illustrates this willingness to listen to
suggested improvements than the inversion of the order of studies in
the biological course which he inaugurated in 1872, namely, the
substitution of the anatomy of a vertebrate for the microscopic
examination of a unicellular organism as the opening study. This was
entirely Parker's doing. "As one privileged at the time to play a minor
part," writes Professor Howes ("Nature" January 6, 1898 page 228), "I
well recall the determination in Parker's mind that the change was
desirable, and in Huxley's, that it was not. Again and again did Parker
appeal in vain, until at last, on the morning of October 2, 1878, he
triumphed."

On his students he made a deep and lasting impression.

His lectures (writes Jeffery Parker) were like his writings, luminously
clear, without the faintest disposition to descend to the level of his
audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so
often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with
no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes
of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is
such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one
felt that comparative anatomy was indeed worthy of the devotion of a
life, and that to solve a morphological problem was as fine a thing as
to win a battle. He was an admirable draughtsman, and his blackboard
illustrations were always a great feature of his lectures, especially
when, to show the relation of two animal types, he would, by a few
rapid strokes and smudges, evolve the one into the other before our
eyes. He seemed to have a real affection for some of the specimens
illustrating his lectures, and would handle them in a peculiarly loving
manner; when he was lecturing on man, for instance, he would sometimes
throw his arm over the shoulder of the skeleton beside him and take its
hand, as if its silent companionship were an inspiration. To me his
lectures before his small class at Jermyn Street or South Kensington
were almost more impressive than the discourses at the Royal
Institution, where for an hour and a half he poured forth a stream of
dignified, earnest, sincere words in perfect literary form, and without
the assistance of a note.

Another description is from the pen of an old pupil in the autumn of
1876, Professor H. Fairfield Osborn, of Columbia College:--

Huxley, as a teacher, can never be forgotten by any of his students. He
entered the lecture-room promptly as the clock was striking nine (In
most years the lectures began at ten.), rather quickly, and with his
head bent forward "as if oppressive with its mind." He usually glanced
attention to his class of about ninety, and began speaking before he
reached his chair. He spoke between his lips, but with perfectly clear
analysis, with thorough interest, and with philosophic insight which
was far above the average of his students. He used very few charts, but
handled the chalk with great skill, sketching out the anatomy of an
animal as if it were a transparent object. As in Darwin's face, and as
in Erasmus Darwin's or Buffon's, and many other anatomists with a
strong sense of form, his eyes were heavily overhung by a projecting
forehead and eyebrows, and seemed at times to look inward. His lips
were firm and closely set, with the expression of positiveness, and the
other feature which most marked him was the very heavy mass of hair
falling over his forehead, which he would frequently stroke or toss
back. Occasionally he would light up the monotony of anatomical
description by a bit of humour.

Huxley was the father of modern laboratory instruction; but in 1879 he
was so intensely engrossed with his own researches that he very seldom
came through the laboratory, which was ably directed by T. Jeffery
Parker, assisted by Howes and W. Newton Parker, all of whom are now
professors, Howes having succeeded to Huxley's chair. Each visit,
therefore, inspired a certain amount of terror, which was really
unwarranted, for Huxley always spoke in the kindest tones to his
students, although sometimes he could not resist making fun at their
expense. There was an Irish student who sat in front of me, whose
anatomical drawings in water-colour were certainly most remarkable
productions. Huxley, in turning over his drawing-book, paused at a
large blur, under which was carefully inscribed, "sheep's liver," and
smilingly said], "I am glad to know that is a liver; it reminds me as
much of Cologne cathedral in a fog as of anything I have ever seen
before." [Fortunately the nationality of the student enabled him to
fully appreciate the humour.

The same note is sounded in Professor Mivart's description of these
lectures in his Reminiscences:--

The great value of Huxley's anatomical ideas, and the admirable
clearness with which he explained them, led me in the autumn of 1861 to
seek admission as a student to his course of lectures at the School of
Mines in Jermyn Street. When I entered his small room there to make
this request, he was giving the finishing touches to a dissection of
part of the nervous system of a skate, worked out for the benefit of
his students. He welcomed my application with the greatest cordiality,
save that he insisted I should be only an honorary student, or rather,
should assist at his lectures as a friend. I availed myself of his
permission on the very next day, and subsequently attended almost all
his lectures there and elsewhere, so that he one day said to me, "I
shall call you my 'constant reader.'" To be such a reader was to me an
inestimable privilege, and so I shall ever consider it. I have heard
many men lecture, but I never heard any one lecture as did Professor
Huxley. He was my very ideal of a lecturer. Distinct in utterance, with
an agreeable voice, lucid as it was possible to be in exposition, with
admirably chosen language, sufficiently rapid, yet never hurried, often
impressive in manner, yet never otherwise than completely natural, and
sometimes allowing his audience a glimpse of that rich fund of humour
ever ready to well forth when occasion permitted, sometimes accompanied
with an extra gleam in his bright dark eyes, sometimes expressed with a
dryness and gravity of look which gave it a double zest.

I shall never forget the first time I saw him enter his lecture-room.
He came in rapidly, yet without bustle, and as the clock struck, a
brief glance at his audience and then at once to work. He had the
excellent habit of beginning each lecture (save, of course, the first)
with a recapitulation of the main points of the preceding one. The
course was amply illustrated by excellent coloured diagrams, which, I
believe, he had made; but still more valuable were the chalk sketches
he would draw on the blackboard with admirable facility, while he was
talking, his rapid, dexterous strokes quickly building up an organism
in our minds, simultaneously through ear and eye. The lecture over, he
was ever ready to answer questions, and I often admired his patience in
explaining points which there was no excuse for any one not having
understood.

Still more was I struck with the great pleasure which he showed when he
saw that some special points of his teaching had not only been
comprehended, but had borne fruit, by their suggestiveness in an
appreciative mind.

To one point I desire specially to bear witness. There were persons who
dreaded sending young men to him, fearing lest their young friends'
religious beliefs should be upset by what they might hear said. For
years I attended his lectures, but never once did I hear him make use
of his position as a teacher to inculcate, or even hint at, his own
theological views, or to depreciate or assail what might be supposed to
be the religion of his hearers. No one could have behaved more loyally
in that respect, and a proof that I thought so is that I subsequently
sent my own son to be his pupil at South Kensington, where his
experience confirmed what had previously been my own.

As to science, I learnt more from him in two years than I had acquired
in any previous decade of biological study.

The picture is completed by Professor Howes in the "Students' Magazine"
of the Royal College of Science:--

As a class lecturer Huxley was facile princeps, and only those who were
privileged to sit under him can form a conception of his delivery.
Clear, deliberate, never hesitant nor unduly emphatic, never
repetitional, always logical, his every word told. Great, however, as
were his class lectures, his working-men's were greater. Huxley was a
firm believer in the "distillatio per ascensum" of scientific knowledge
and culture, and spared no pains in approaching the artisan and
so-called "working classes." He gave the workmen of his best. The
substance of his "Man's Place in Nature", one of the most successful
and popular of his writings, and of his "Crayfish", perhaps the most
perfect zoological treatise ever published, was first communicated to
them. In one of the last conversations I had with him, I asked his
views on the desirability of discontinuing the workmen's lectures at
Jermyn Street, since the development of working-men's colleges and
institutes is regarded by some to have rendered their continuance
unnecessary. He replied, almost with indignation], "With our central
situation and resources, we ought to be in a position to give the
workmen that which they cannot get elsewhere," [adding that he would
deeply deplore any such discontinuance.

And now, a word or two concerning Huxley's personal conduct towards his
pupils, hearers, and subordinates.

As an examiner he was most just, aiming only to ascertain the
examinee's knowledge of fundamentals, his powers of work, and the
manner in which he had been taught. A country school lad came near the
boundary line in the examination; though generally weak, his worst
fault was a confusion of the parts of the heart. In his description of
that organ he had transposed the valves. On appeal, Huxley let him
through, observing, most characteristically, "Poor little beggar, I
never got them correctly myself until I reflected that a bishop was
never in the right." (The "mitral" valve being on the left side.)
Again, a student of more advanced years, of the "mugging" type, who had
come off with flying colours in an elementary examination, showed signs
of uneasiness as the advanced one approached. "Stick an observation
into him," said Huxley. It was stuck, and acted like a stiletto, a jump
into the air and utter collapse being the result.

With his hearers Huxley was most sympathetic. He always assumed
absolute ignorance on their part, and took nothing for granted. (This
was a maxim on lecturing, adopted from Faraday.) When time permitted,
he would remain after a lecture to answer questions; and in connection
with his so doing his wonderful power of gauging and rising to a
situation, once came out most forcibly. Turning to a student, he asked,
"Well, I hope you understood it all." "All, sir, but one part, during
which you stood between me and the blackboard," was the reply: the
rejoinder, "I did my best to make myself clear, but could not render
myself transparent." Quick of comprehension and of action, he would
stand no nonsense. The would-be teacher who, wholly unfitted by nature
for educational work, was momentarily dismissed, realised this, let us
hope to his advantage. And the man suspected of taking notes of
Huxley's lectures for publication unauthorised, probably learned the
lesson of his life, on being reminded that, in the first place, a
lecture was the property of the person who delivered it, and, in the
second, he was not the first person who had mistaken aspiration for
inspiration.

Though candid, Huxley was never unkind...

Huxley never forgot a kindly action, never forsook a friend, nor
allowed a labour to go unrewarded. In testimony to his sympathy to
those about him and his self-sacrifice for the cause of science, it may
be stated that in the old days, when the professors took the fees and
disbursed the working expenses of the laboratories, he, doing this at a
loss, would refund the fees of students whose position, from friendship
or special circumstances, was exceptional.

As for his lectures and addresses to the public, they used to be
thronged by crowds of attentive listeners.

Huxley's public addresses (writes Professor Osborn) always gave me the
impression of being largely impromptu; but he once told me: "I always
think out carefully every word I am going to say. There is no greater
danger than the so-called INSPIRATION OF THE MOMENT, which leads you to
say something which is not exactly true, or which you would regret
afterwards."

Mr. G.W. Smalley has also left a striking description of him as a
lecturer in the seventies and early eighties.

I used always to admire the simple and business-like way in which
Huxley made his entry on great occasions. He hated anything like
display, and would have none of it. At the Royal Institution, more than
almost anywhere else, the lecturer, on whom the concentric circles of
spectators in their steep amphitheatre look down, focuses the gaze.
Huxley never seemed aware that anybody was looking at him. From
self-consciousness he was, here as elsewhere, singularly free, as from
self-assertion. He walked in through the door on the left, as if he
were entering his own laboratory. In these days he bore scarcely a mark
of age. He was in the full vigour of manhood and looked the man he was.
Faultlessly dressed--the rule in the Royal Institution is evening
costume--with a firm step and easy bearing, he took his place
apparently without a thought of the people who were cheering him. To
him it was an anniversary. He looked, and he probably was, the master.
Surrounded as he was by the celebrities of science and the ornaments of
London drawing-rooms, there was none who had quite the same kind of
intellectual ascendancy which belonged to him. The square forehead, the
square jaw, the tense lines of the mouth, the deep flashing dark eyes,
the impression of something more than strength he gave you, an
impression of sincerity, of solid force, of immovability, yet with the
gentleness arising from the serene consciousness of his strength--all
this belonged to Huxley and to him alone. The first glance magnetised
his audience. The eyes were those of one accustomed to command, of one
having authority, and not fearing on occasion to use it. The hair swept
carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew rather long behind,
yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was
masculine in everything--look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture,
sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art, he
had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in
oratory or whatever else--he had simplicity. The force was in the
thought and the diction, and he needed no other. The voice was rather
deep, low, but quite audible, at times sonorous, and always full. He
used the chest-notes. His manner here, in the presence of this select
and rather limited audience--for the theatre of the Royal Institution
holds, I think, less than a thousand people--was exactly the same as
before a great company whom he addressed at [Liverpool], as President
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. I remember
going late to that, and having to sit far back, yet hearing every word
easily; and there too the feeling was the same, that he had mastered
his audience, taken possession of them, and held them to the end in an
unrelaxing grip, as a great actor at his best does. There was nothing
of the actor about him, except that he knew how to stand still, but
masterful he ever was.

Up to the time of his last illness, he regularly breakfasted at eight,
and avoided, as far as possible, going out to that meal, a "detestable
habit" as he called it, which put him off for the whole day. He left
the house about nine, and from that time till midnight at earliest was
incessantly busy. His regular lectures involved an immensity of labour,
for he would never make a statement in them which he had not personally
verified by experiment. In the Jermyn Street days he habitually made
preparations to illustrate the points on which he was lecturing, for
his students had no laboratory in which to work out the things for
themselves. His lectures to working-men also involved as much careful
preparation as the more conspicuous discourses at the Royal Institution.

This thoroughness of preparation had no less effect on the teacher than
on the taught. He writes to an old pupil:--]

It is pleasant when the "bread cast upon the water" returns after many
days; and if the crumbs given in my lectures have had anything to do
with the success on which I congratulate you, I am very glad.

I used to say of my own lectures that if nobody else learned anything
from them, I did; because I always took a great deal of pains over
them. But it is none the less satisfactory to find that there WERE
other learners.

[As for the ordinary course of a day's work, the more fitful energy and
useless mornings of the earliest period in London were soon left
behind. He was never one of those portentously early risers who do a
fair day's work before other people are up; there was only one period,
about 1873, when he had to be specially careful of his health, and,
under Sir Andrew Clark's regime, took riding exercise for an hour each
day before starting for South Kensington, that he records the fact of
doing any work before breakfast, and that was letter-writing.

Much of the day during the session, and still more when his lectures
were over, would thus be spent in original research, or in the
examination and description of fossils in his official duty as
Paleontologist to the Survey. As often as not, there would be a sitting
of some Royal Commission to attend; committees of some learned society;
meetings or dinners in the evening; if not, there would be an article
to write or proofs to correct. Indeed, the greater part of the work by
which the world knows him best was done after dinner, and after a long
day's work in the lecture-room and laboratory.

He possessed a wonderful faculty for tearing out the heart of a book,
reading it through at a gallop, but knowing what it said on all the
points that interested him. Of verbal memory he had very little; in
spite of all his reading I do not believe he knew half a dozen
consecutive lines of poetry by heart. What he did know was the
substance of what an author had written; how it fitted into his own
scheme of knowledge; and where to find any point again when he wished
to cite it.

In his biological studies his immense knowledge was firmly fixed in his
mind by practical investigation; as is said above, he would take at
second hand nothing for which he vouched in his teaching, and was
always ready to repeat for himself the experiments of others, which
determined questions of interest to him. The citations, analyses, maps,
with which he frequently accompanied his reading, were all part of the
same method of acquiring facts and setting them in order within his
mind. So careful, indeed, was he in giving nothing at second hand, that
one of his scientific friends reproached him with wasting his time upon
unnecessary scientific work, to which competent investigators had
already given the stamp of their authority. "Poor--," was his comment
afterwards, "if that is his own practice, his work will never live." On
the literary side, he was omnivorous--consuming everything, as Mr.
Spencer put it, from fairy tales to the last volume on metaphysics.

Unlike Darwin, to whom scientific research was at length the only thing
engrossing enough to make him oblivious of his never-ending ill-health,
to the gradual exclusion of other interests, literary and artistic,
Huxley never lost his delight in literature or in art. He had a keen
eye for a picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the
draughtsman's and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of
colour. To good music he was always susceptible. (To one breaking in
upon him at certain afternoon hours in his room at South Kensington, "a
whiff of the pipe" (writes Professor Howes), "and a snatch of some
choice melody or a Bach's fugue, were the not infrequent welcome.") He
played no instrument; as a young man, however, he used to sing a
little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. But he had small
leisure to devote to art. On his holidays he would sometimes sketch
with a firm and rapid touch. His illustrations to the "Cruise of the
Rattlesnake" show what his untrained capacities were. But to go to a
concert or opera was rare after middle life; to go to the theatre rarer
still, much as he appreciated a good play. His time was too deeply
mortgaged; and in later life, the deafness which grew upon him added a
new difficulty.

In poetry he was sensitive both to matter and form. One school of
modern poetry he dismissed as "sensuous caterwauling": a busy man, time
and patience failed him to wade through the trivial discursiveness of
so much of Wordsworth's verse; thus unfortunately he never realised the
full value of a poet in whom the mass of ore bears so large a
proportion to the pure metal. Shelley was too diffuse to be among his
first favourites; but for simple beauty, Keats; for that, and for the
comprehension of the meaning of modern science, Tennyson; for strength
and feeling, Browning as represented by his earlier poems--these were
the favourites among the moderns. He knew his eighteenth-century
classics, but knew better his Milton and his Shakespeare, to whom he
turned with ever-increasing satisfaction, as men do who have lived a
full life.

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