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

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His early acquaintance with German had given him a lasting admiration
of the greatest representatives of German literature, Goethe above all,
in whose writings he found a moral grandeur to be ranked with that of
the Hebrew prophets. Eager to read Dante in the original, he spent much
of his leisure on board the "Rattlesnake" in making out the Italian
with the aid of a dictionary, and in this way came to know the beauties
of the "Divina Commedia". On the other hand, it was a scientific
interest which led him in later life to take up his Greek, though one
use he put it to was to read Homer in the original.

Though he was a great novel-reader, and, as he grew older, would always
have a novel ready to take up for a while in the evening, his chief
reading, in German and French as well as English, was philosophy and
history.

His recreations were, as a rule, literary, and consisted in a change of
mental occupation. The only times I can remember his playing an outdoor
game are in the late sixties, when he started his elder children at
cricket on the common at Littlehampton, and in 1871 when he played golf
at St. Andrews. When first married, he promised his wife to reserve
Saturday afternoons for recreation, and constantly went with her to the
Ella concerts. About 1861 she urged him to take exercise by joining Mr.
Herbert Spencer at racquets; but the pressure of work before long
absorbed all his time. In his youth he was extremely fond of chess, and
played eagerly with his fellow-students at Charing Cross Hospital or
with his messmates on board the "Rattlesnake". But after he taught me
the game, somewhere about 1869 or 1870, I do not think he ever found
time for it again.

His principal exercise was walking during the holidays. In his earlier
days especially, when overwrought by the stress of his life in London,
he used to go off with a friend for a week's walking tour in Wales or
the Lakes, in Brittany or the Eifel country, or in summer for a longer
trip to Switzerland. In this way he "burnt up the waste products," as
he would say, of his town life, and came back fresh for a new spell of
unintermittent work.

But on the whole, the amount of exercise he took was insufficient for
his bodily needs. Even the riding prescribed for him when he first
broke down, became irksome, and was not continued very long, although
his bodily machine was such as could only be kept in perfect working
order by more exercise than he would give. His physique was not adapted
to burn up the waste without special stimulus. I remember once, as he
and I were walking up Beachy Head, we passed a man with a splendid big
chest. "Ah," said my father regretfully, "if I had only had a chest
like that, what a lot of work I could have done."

When, in 1872, he built his new house in Marlborough Place, my father
bargained for two points; one, that each member of the family should
have a corner of his or her own, where, as he used to say, it would be
possible to "consume their own smoke"; the other, that the common
living-rooms should be of ample size. Thus from 1874 onwards he was
enabled to see something of his many friends who would come as far as
St. John's Wood on a Sunday evening. No formal invitation for a special
day was needed. The guests came, before supper or after, sometimes
more, sometimes fewer, as on any ordinary at-home day. There was a
simple informal meal at 6.30 or 7 o'clock, which called itself by no
more dignified name than high tea--was, in fact, a cold supper with
varying possibilities in the direction of dinner or tea. It was a
chance medley of old and young--friends of the parents and friends of
the children, but all ultimately centring round the host himself, whose
end of the table never flagged for conversation, grave or gay.

Afterwards talk would go on in the drawing-room, or, on warm summer
evenings, in the garden--nothing very extensive, but boasting a lawn
with an old apple-tree at the further end, and in the borders such
flowers and trees as endure London air. Later on, there was almost sure
to be some music, to which my father himself was devoted. His daughters
sang; a musical friend would be there; Mr. Herbert Spencer, a frequent
visitor, was an authority on music. Once only do I recollect any other
form of entertainment, and that was an occasion when Sir Henry Irving,
then not long established at the Lyceum, was present and recited
"Eugene Aram" with great effect.

In his "London Letters" Mr. G.W. Smalley has recorded his impressions
of these evenings (Another interesting account from the same pen is to
be found in the article "Mr. Huxley," Scribner's Magazine, October
1895.), at which he was often present:--

There used to be Sunday evening dinners and parties in Marlborough
Place, to which people from many other worlds than those of abstract
science were bidden; where talk was to be heard of a kind rare in any
world. It was scientific at times, but subdued to the necessities of
the occasion; speculative, yet kept within such bounds that bishop or
archbishop might have listened without offence; political even, and
still not commonplace; literary without pretence, and when artistic,
free from affectation.

There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he cared to, or
if challenged. Nobody was more ready in a greater variety of topics,
and if they were scientific it was almost always another who introduced
them. Unlike some of his comrades of the Royal Society, he was of
opinion that man does not live by science alone, and nothing came amiss
to him. All his life long he has been in the front of the battle that
has raged between science and--not religion, but theology in its more
dogmatic form. Even in private the alarm of war is sometimes heard, and
Mr. Huxley is not a whit less formidable as a disputant across the
table than with pen in hand. Yet an angry man must be very angry indeed
before he could be angry with this adversary. He disarmed his enemies
with an amiable grace that made defeat endurable if not entirely
delightful.

As for his method of handling scientific subjects in conversation:--

He has the same quality, the same luminous style of exposition, with
which his printed books have made all readers in America and England
familiar. Yet it has more than that. You cannot listen to him without
thinking more of the speaker than of his science, more of the solid
beautiful nature than of the intellectual gifts, more of his manly
simplicity and sincerity than of all his knowledge and his long
services.

But his personality left the deepest impression, perhaps, upon those
who studied under him and worked with him longest, before taking their
place elsewhere in the front ranks of biological science.

With him (Professor A. Hubrecht (Of Utrecht University.) writes), we
his younger disciples, always felt that in acute criticism and vast
learning nobody surpassed him, but still what we yet more admired than
his learning was his wisdom. It was always a delight to read any new
article or essay from his pen, but it was an ever so much higher
delight to hear him talk for five minutes. His was the most beautiful
and the most manly intellect I ever knew of.

So, too, Professor E. Ray Lankester:--

There has been no man or woman whom I have met on my journey through
life, whom I have loved and regarded as I have him, and I feel that the
world has shrunk and become a poor thing, now that his splendid spirit
and delightful presence are gone from it. Ever since I was a little boy
he has been my ideal and hero.

While the late Jeffery Parker concludes his Recollections with these
words:--

Whether a professor is usually a hero to his demonstrator I cannot say;
I only know that, looking back across an interval of many years and a
distance of half the circumference of the globe, I have never ceased to
be impressed with the manliness and sincerity of his character, his
complete honesty of purpose, his high moral standard, his scorn of
everything mean or shifty, his firm determination to speak what he held
to be truth at whatever cost of popularity. And for these things "I
loved the man, and do honour to his memory, on this side idolatry, as
much as any."

Even those who scarcely knew him apart from his books, underwent the
influence of that "determination to speak what he held to be truth." I
may perhaps be allowed to quote in illustration two passages from
letters to myself--one written by a woman, the other by a man:--

"'The surest-footed guide' is exactly true, to my feeling. Everybody
else, among the great, used to disappoint one somewhere. He--never!"

"He was so splendidly brave that one can never repay one's debt to him
for his example. He made all pretence about religious belief, and the
kind of half-thinking things out, and putting up in a slovenly way with
half-formed conclusions, seem the base thing which it really is."

CHAPTER 3.16.

1895.

[I have often regretted that I did not regularly take notes of my
father's conversation, which was striking, not so much for the manner
of it--though that was at once copious and crisp,--as for the strength
and substance of what he said. Yet the striking fact, the bit of
philosophy, the closely knitted argument, were perfectly unstudied, and
as in other most interesting talkers, dropped into the flow of
conversation as naturally as would the more ordinary experiences of
less richly stored minds.

However, in January 1895 I was staying at Eastbourne, and jotted down
several fragments of talk as nearly as I could recollect them.
Conversation not immediately noted down I hardly dare venture upon,
save perhaps such an unforgettable phrase as this, which I remember his
using one day as we walked on the hills near Great Hampden]:--"It is
one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can
never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always
be certain of making them unhappy."

[JANUARY 16.

At lunch he spoke of Dr. Louis Robinson's experiments upon simian
characteristics in new-born children. He himself had called attention
before to the incurved feet of infants, but the power of hanging by the
hands was a new and important discovery. (Professor H.F. Osborn tells
this story of his:--"When a fond mother calls upon me to admire her
baby, I never fail to respond; and while cooing appropriately, I take
advantage of an opportunity to gently ascertain whether the soles of
its feet turn in, and tend to support my theory of arboreal descent.")

He expressed his disgust with a certain member of the Psychical
Research Society for his attitude towards spiritualism]: "He doesn't
believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name. He is one of the
people who talk of the 'possibility' of the thing, who think the
difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its
favour."

[He thought it hard to be attacked for] "the contempt of the man of
science" [when he was dragged into debate by Mr. Andrew Lang's "Cock
Lane and Common Sense", he saying in a very polite letter}: "I am
content to leave Mr. Lang the Cock Lane Ghost if I may keep common
sense." "After all," [he added], "when a man has been through life and
made his judgments, he must have come to a decision that there are some
subjects it is not worth while going into."

JANUARY 18.

I referred to an article in the last "Nineteenth Century", and he
said]:--"As soon as I saw it, I wrote, 'Knowles, my friend, you don't
draw me this time. If a man goes on attributing statements to me which
I have shown over and over again--giving chapter and verse--to be the
contrary of what I did say, it is no good saying any more.'"

[But would not this course of silence leave the mass of the British
public believing the statements of the writer?]

"The mass of the public will believe in ten years precisely the
opposite of what they believe now. If a man is not a fool, it does him
no harm to be believed one. If he really is a fool, it does matter.
There never was book so derided and scoffed at as my first book, "Man's
Place in Nature", but it was true, and I don't know I was any the worse
for the ridicule.

"People call me fond of controversy, but, as a fact, for the last
twenty years at all events, I have never entered upon a controversy
without some further purpose in view. As to Gladstone and his
"Impregnable Rock", it wasn't worth attacking them for themselves; but
it was most important at that moment to shake him in the minds of
sensible men.

"The movement of modern philosophy is back towards the position of the
old Ionian philosophers, but strengthened and clarified by sound
scientific ideas. If I publish my criticism on Comte, I should have to
re-write it as a summary of philosophical ideas from the earliest
times. The thread of philosophical development is not on the lines
usually laid down for it. It goes from Democritus and the rest to the
Epicureans, and then the Stoics, who tried to reconcile it with popular
theological ideas, just as was done by the Christian Fathers. In the
Middle Ages it was entirely lost under the theological theories of the
time; but reappeared with Spinoza, who, however, muddled it up with a
lot of metaphysics which made him almost unintelligible.

"Plato was the founder of all the vague and unsound thinking that has
burdened philosophy, deserting facts for possibilities, and then, after
long and beautiful stories of what might be, telling you he doesn't
quite believe them himself.

"A certain time since it was heresy to breathe a word against Plato;
but I have a nice story of Sir Henry Holland. He used to have all the
rising young men to breakfast, and turn out their latest ideas. One
morning I went to breakfast with him, and we got into very intimate
conversation, when he wound up by saying, 'In my opinion, Plato was an
ass! But don't tell any one I said so.'"

We talked on geographical teaching; he began by insisting on the need
of a map of the earth (on the true scale) showing the insignificance of
all elevations and depressions on the surface. Secondly, one should
take any place as centre, and draw about it circles of 50 or 100 miles
radius, and see what lies within them; and note the extent of the
influence exerted by the central point. At the same time, one should
always compare the British Isles to scale. For instance, the Aegean is
about as big as Britain; while the smallness of Judaea is remarkable.
After the Exile, the Jewish part was about as big as the county of
Gloucester. How few boys realise this, though they are taught classical
geography.

"The real chosen people were the Greeks. One of the most remarkable
things about them is not only the smallness, but the late rise of
Attica, whereas Magna Graecia flourished in the eighth century. The
Greeks were doing everything--piracy, trade, fighting, expelling the
Persians. Never was there so large a number of self-governing
communities.

"They fell short of the Jews in morality. How curious is the tolerant
attitude of Socrates, like a modern man of the world talking to a young
fellow who runs after the girls. The Jew, however he fell short in
other respects, set himself a certain standard in cleanliness of life,
and would not fall below it. The more creditable to him, because these
vices were the offspring of the Semitic races among whom the Jew lived.

"There is a curious similarity between the position of the Jew in
ancient times and what it is now. They were procurers and usurers among
the Gentiles, yet many of them were singularly high-minded and pure.
All too with an intense clannishness, the secret of their success, and
a sense of superiority to the Gentile which would prevent the meanest
Jew from sitting at table with a proconsul.

"The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for
eighteen centuries his own superstitions--his ideas of the
supernatural. Jahveh was no more than Zeus or Milcom; yet the Jew got
established the belief in the inspiration of his Bible and his Law. If
I were a Jew, I should have the same contempt as he has for the
Christian who acted in this way towards me, who took my ideas and
scorned me for clinging to them."

[January 21.

Yesterday evening he again declared that it was very hard for a man of
peace like himself to have been dragged into so many controversies.] "I
declare that for the last twenty years I have never attacked, but
always fought in self-defence, counting Darwin, of course, as part of
myself, for dear Darwin never could nor would defend himself. Before
that, I admit I attacked --, but I could not trust the man." [A pause.]
"No, there was one other case, when I attacked without being directly
assailed, and that was Gladstone. But it was good for other reasons. It
has always astonished me how a man after fifty or sixty years of life
among men could be so ignorant of the best way to handle his materials.
If he had only read Dana, he would have found his case much better
stated than ever he stated it. He seemed never to have read the leading
authorities on his own side."

[Speaking of the hesitation shown by the Senate of London University in
grappling with a threatened obstacle to reform, he remarked]: "It is
very strange how most men will do anything to evade responsibility."

[January 23.

At dinner the talk turned on plays. Mr. H.A. Jones had sent him
"Judah", which he thought good, though] "there must be some
hostility--except in the very greatest writers--between the dramatic
and the literary faculties. I noticed many points I objected to, but
felt sure they met with applause. Indeed in the theatre I have noticed
that what I thought the worst blots on a piece invariably brought down
the house."

[He remarked how the French, in dramatic just as in artistic matters,
are so much better than the English in composition, in avoiding
anything slipshod in the details, though the English artists draw just
as well and colour perhaps better.

The following sketch of human character is not actually a fragment of
conversation, though it might almost pass for such; it comes from a
letter to Mrs. W.K. Clifford, of February 10, 1895:--]

Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness,
ass-stubbornness and camel-malice--with an angel bobbing about
unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly
as they please, they are very hard to drive.

[Whatever he talked of, his talk never failed to impress those who
conversed with him. One or two such impressions have been recorded. Mr.
Wilfrid Ward, whose interests lie chiefly in philosophy and theology,
was his neighbour at Eastbourne, and in the "Nineteenth Century" for
August 1896 has given various reminiscences of their friendly
intercourse.

His conversation (he writes) was singularly finished, and (if I may so
express it) clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid
illustrations. He was an excellent raconteur, and his stories had a
stamp of their own which would have made them always and everywhere
acceptable. His sense of humour and economy of words would have made it
impossible, had he lived to ninety, that they should ever have been
disparaged as symptoms of what has been called "anecdotage."

One drawback to conversation, however, he began to complain of during
the later seventies.]

It is a great misfortune [he remarked to Professor Osborn] to be deaf
in only one ear. Every time I dine out the lady sitting by my good ear
thinks I am charming, but I make a mortal enemy of the lady on my deaf
side.

[In ordinary conversation he never plunged at once into deep subjects.
His welcome to the newcomer was always of the simplest and most
unstudied. He had no mannerisms nor affectation of phrase. He would
begin at once to talk on everyday topics; an intimate friend he would
perhaps rally upon some standing subject of persiflage. But the
subsequent course of conversation adapted itself to his company. Deeper
subjects were reached soon enough by those who cared for them; with
others he was quite happy to talk of politics or people or his garden,
yet, whatever he touched, never failing to infuse into it an unexpected
interest.

In this connection, a typical story was told me by a great friend of
mine, whom we had come to know through his marriage with an early
friend of the family. "Going to call at Hodeslea," he said, "I was in
some trepidation, because I didn't know anything about science or
philosophy; but when your mother began to talk over old times with my
wife, your father came across the room and sat down by me, and began to
talk about the dog which we had brought with us. From that he got on to
the different races of dogs and their origin and connections, all quite
simply, and not as though to give information, but just to talk about
something which obviously interested me. I shall never forget how
extraordinarily kind it was of your father to take all this trouble in
entertaining a complete stranger, and choosing a subject which put me
at my ease at once, while he told me all manner of new and interesting
things."

A few more fragments of his conversation have been preserved--the
following by Mr. Wilfrid Ward. Speaking of Tennyson's conversation, he
said:--

Doric beauty is its characteristic--perfect simplicity, without any
ornament or anything artificial.

Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Trustees, he
said:--]

After the meeting, Archbishop Benson helped me on with my great-coat. I
was QUITE OVERCOME by this species of spiritual investiture. "Thank
you, Archbishop," I said, "I feel as if I were receiving the pallium."

[Speaking of two men of letters, with neither of whom he sympathised,
he once said:--]

Don't mistake me. One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is
only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters, Gigadibs a literary
man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should call him Gigadibsius
Optimus Maximus.

[Another time, referring to Dean Stanley's historical
impressionability, as militating against his sympathies with Colenso,
he said:--]

Stanley could believe in anything of which he had seen the supposed
site, but was sceptical where he had not seen. At a breakfast at
Monckton Milnes's, just at the time of the Colenso row, Milnes asked me
my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave them. Stanley differed from me.
The account of Creation in Genesis he dismissed at once as
unhistorical; but the call of Abraham, and the historical narrative of
the Pentateuch, he accepted. This was because he had seen
Palestine--but he wasn't present at the Creation.

[When he and Stanley met, there was sure to be a brisk interchange of
repartee. One of these occasions, a ballot day at the Athenaeum, has
been recorded by the late Sir W.H. Flower:--

A well-known popular preacher of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, who
had made himself famous by predictions of the speedy coming of the end
of the world, was up for election. I was standing by Huxley when the
Dean, coming straight from the ballot boxes, turned towards us.]
"Well," [said Huxley], "have you been voting for C.?" ["Yes, indeed I
have," replied the Dean.] "Oh, I thought the priests were always
opposed to the prophets," [said Huxley.] "Ah!" replied the Dean, with
that well-known twinkle in his eye, and the sweetest of smiles, "but
you see, I do not believe in his prophecies, and some people say I am
not much of a priest."

A few words as to his home life may perhaps be fitly introduced here.
Towards his children he had the same union of underlying tenderness
veiled beneath inflexible determination for what was right, which
marked his intercourse with those outside his family.

As children we were fully conscious of this side of his character. We
felt our little hypocrisies shrivel up before him; we felt a confidence
in the infallible rectitude of his moral judgments which inspired a
kind of awe. His arbitrament was instant and final, though rarely
invoked, and was perhaps the more tremendous in proportion to its
rarity. This aspect, as if of an oracle without appeal, was heightened
in our minds by the fact that we saw but little of him. This was one of
the penalties of his hard-driven existence. In the struggle to keep his
head above water for the first fifteen or twenty years of his married
life, he had scarcely any time to devote to his children. The "lodger,"
as he used to call himself at one time, who went out early and came
back late, could sometimes spare half an hour just before or after
dinner to draw wonderful pictures for the little ones, and these were
memorable occasions. I remember that he used to profess a horror of
being too closely watched, or of receiving suggestions, while he drew.
"Take care, take care," he would exclaim, "or I don't know what it will
turn into."

When I was seven years old I had the misfortune to be laid up with
scarlet fever, and then his gift of drawing was a great solace to me.
The solitary days--for I was the first victim in the family--were very
long, and I looked forward with intense interest to one half-hour after
dinner, when he would come up and draw scenes from the history of a
remarkable bull-terrier and his family that went to the seaside, in a
most human and child-delighting manner. I have seldom suffered a
greater disappointment than when, one evening, I fell asleep just
before this fairy half-hour, and lost it out of my life.

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