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

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In those days he often used to take the three eldest of us out for a
walk on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the Zoological Gardens, more
often to the lanes and fields between St. John's Wood and Hampstead or
West End. For then the flood of bricks and mortar ceased on the
Finchley Road just beyond the Swiss Cottage, and the West End Lane,
winding solitary between its high hedges and rural ditches, was quite
like a country road in holiday time, and was sometimes gladdened in
June with real dog-roses, although the church and a few houses had
already begun to encroach on the open fields at the end of the Abbey
Road.

My father often used to delight us with sea stories and tales of
animals, and occasionally with geological sketches suggested by the
gravels of Hampstead Heath. But regular "shop" he would not talk to us,
contrary to the expectation of people who have often asked me whether
we did not receive quite a scientific training from his companionship.

At the Christmas dinner he invariably delighted the children by carving
wonderful beasts, generally pigs, out of orange peel. When the marriage
of his eldest daughter had taken her away from this important function,
she was sent the best specimen as a reminder.]

4 Marlborough Place, December 25, 1878.

Dearest Jess,

We have just finished the mid-day Christmas dinner, at which function
you were badly wanted. The inflammation of the pudding was highly
successful--in fact Vesuvian not to say Aetnaic--and I have never yet
attained so high a pitch in piggygenesis as on this occasion.

The specimen I enclose, wrapped in a golden cerecloth, and with the
remains of his last dinner in the proper region, will prove to you the
heights to which the creative power of the true artist may soar. I call
it a "Piggurne, or a Harmony in Orange and White."

Preserve it, my dear child, as evidence of the paternal genius, when
those light and fugitive productions which are buried in the
philosophical transactions and elsewhere are forgotten.

My best wishes to Fred and you, and may you succeed better than I do in
keeping warm.

Ever your loving father,

T.H. Huxley.

[Later on, however, the younger children who kept up the home at
Marlborough Place after the elder ones had married or gone out into the
world, enjoyed more opportunities of his ever-mellowing companionship.
Strongly as he upheld the conventions when these represented some valid
results of social experience, he was always ready to set aside his mere
likes and dislikes on good cause shown; to follow reason as against the
mere prejudice of custom, even his own.

Severe he might be on occasion, but never harsh. His idea in bringing
up his children was to accustom them as early as possible to a certain
amount of independence, at the same time trying to make them regard him
as their best friend.

This aspect of his character is specially touched upon by Sir Leslie
Stephen, in a letter written to my mother in July 1895:--

No one, I think, could have more cordially admired Huxley's
intellectual vigour and unflinching honesty than I. It pleases me to
remember that I lately said something of this to him, and that he
received what I said most heartily and kindly. But what now dwells most
in my mind is the memory of old kindness, and of the days when I used
to see him with you and his children. I may safely say that I never
came from your house without thinking how good he is; what a tender and
affectionate nature the man has! It did me good simply to see him. The
recollection is sweet to me now, and I rejoice to think how infinitely
better you know what I must have been dull indeed not more or less to
perceive.

As he wrote to his son on his twenty-first birthday:--]

You will have a son some day yourself, I suppose, and if you do, I can
wish you no greater satisfaction than to be able to say that he has
reached manhood without having given you a serious anxiety, and that
you can look forward with entire confidence to his playing the man in
the battle of life. I have tried to make you feel your responsibilities
and act independently as early as possible--but, once for all, remember
that I am not only your father but your nearest friend, ready to help
you in all things reasonable, and perhaps in a few unreasonable.

[This domestic happiness which struck others so forcibly was one of the
vital realities of his existence. Without it his quick spirit and
nervous temperament could never have endured the long and often
embittered struggle--not merely with equanimity, but with a constant
growth of sympathy for earnest humanity, which, in early days obscured
from view by the turmoil of strife, at length became apparent to all as
the tide of battle subsided. None realised more than himself what the
sustaining help and comradeship of married life had wrought for him,
alike in making his life worth living and in making his life's work
possible. Here he found the pivot of his happiness and his strength;
here he recognised to the full the care that took upon itself all
possible burdens and left his mind free for his greater work.

He had always a great tenderness for children. "One of my earliest
recollections of him," writes Jeffery Parker, "is in connection with a
letter he wrote to my father, on the occasion of the death, in infancy,
of one of my brothers. 'Why,' he wrote, 'did you not tell us before
that the child was named after me, that we might have made his short
life happier by a toy or two.' I never saw a man more crushed than he
was during the dangerous illness of one of his daughters, and he told
me that, having then to make an after-dinner speech, he broke down for
the first time in his life, and for one painful moment forgot where he
was and what he had to say. I can truly say that I never knew a man
whose way of speaking of his family, or whose manner in his own home,
was fuller of a noble, loving, and withal playful courtesy."

After he had retired to Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the
benefit of his greater leisure. In his age his love of children brimmed
over with undiminished force, unimpeded by circumstances. He would make
endless fun with them, until one little mite, on her first visit, with
whom her grandfather was trying to ingratiate himself with a vast deal
of nonsense, exclaimed: "Well, you are the curioustest old man I ever
seen."

Another, somewhat older, developed a great liking for astronomy under
her grandfather's tuition. One day a visitor, entering unexpectedly,
was astonished to find the pair of them kneeling on the floor in the
hall before a large sheet of paper, on which the professor was drawing
a diagram of the solar system on a large scale, with a little pellet
and a large ball to represent earth and sun, while the child was
listening with the closest attention to an account of the planets and
their movements, which he knew so well how to make simple and precise
without ever being dull.

Children seemed to have a natural confidence in the expression of
mingled power and sympathy which, especially in his later years,
irradiated his "square, wise, swarthy face" ("There never was a face, I
do believe" (wrote Sir Walter Besant of the portrait by John Collier),
"wiser, more kindly, more beautiful for wisdom and the kindliness of
it, than this of Huxley."--The "Queen", November 16, 1895.), and
proclaimed to all the sublimation of a broad native humanity tried by
adversity and struggle in the pursuit of noble ends. It was the
confidence that an appeal would not be rejected, whether for help in
distress, or for the satisfaction of the child's natural desire for
knowledge.

Spirit and determination in children always delighted him. His grandson
Julian, a curly-haired rogue, alternately cherub and pickle, was a
source of great amusement and interest to him. The boy must have been
about four years old when my father one day came in from the garden,
where he had been diligently watering his favourite plants with a big
hose, and said: "I like that chap! I like the way he looks you straight
in the face and disobeys you. I told him not to go on the wet grass
again. He just looked up boldly, straight at me, as much as to say,
'What do YOU mean by ordering me about?' and deliberately walked on to
the grass."

The disobedient youth who so charmed his grandfather's heart was the
prototype of Sandy in Mrs. Humphry Ward's "David Grieve". When the book
came out my father wrote to the author: "We are very proud of Julian's
apotheosis. He is a most delightful imp, and the way in which he used
to defy me on occasion, when he was here, was quite refreshing. The
strength of his conviction that people who interfere with his freedom
are certainly foolish, probably wicked, is quite Gladstonian."

A year after, when Julian had learned to write, and was reading the
immortal "Water Babies", wherein fun is poked at his grandfather's name
among the authorities on water-babies and water-beasts of every
description, he greatly desired more light as to the reality of
water-babies. There is a picture by Linley Sambourne, showing my father
and Owen examining a bottled water-baby under big magnifying glasses.
Here, then, was a real authority to consult. So he wrote a letter of
inquiry, first anxiously asking his mother if he would receive in reply
a "proper letter" that he could read for himself, or a "wrong kind of
letter" that must be read to him.

Dear Grandpater,

Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if
it could get out? Can I see it some day?

Your loving

Julian.

To this he received the following reply from his grandfather, neatly
printed, letter by letter, very unlike the orderly confusion with which
his pen usually rushed across the paper--time being so short for such a
multitude of writing--to the great perplexity, often, of his foreign
correspondents.]

HODESLEA, STAVELEY ROAD, EASTBOURNE, March 24 1892.

My dear Julian

I never could make sure about that Water Baby. I have seen Babies in
water and Babies in bottles; but the Baby in the water was not in a
bottle and the Baby in the bottle was not in water.

My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby, was a very kind man
and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as
he did--There are some people who see a great deal and some who see
very little in the same things.

When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers and
see things more wonderful than Water Babies where other folks can see
nothing.

Give my best love to Daddy and Mammy and Trevenen--Grand is a little
better but not up yet--

Ever

Your loving

Grandpater.

[Others of his family would occasionally receive elaborate pieces of
nonsense, of which I give a couple of specimens. The following is to
his youngest daughter:--]

Athenaeum Club, May 17, 1892.

Dearest Babs,

As I was going along Upper Thames

Street just now, I saw between Numbers 170 and 211 ( (primary
parenthesis) but you would like to know what I was going along that
odorous street for. Well, it was to inquire how the pen with which I am
now writing--( (2nd parenthesis) you see it is a new-fangled fountain
pen, warranted to cure the worst writing and always spell properly)
(2nd parenthesis)--works, because it would not work properly this
morning. And the nice young woman who took it from me--( (3rd
parenthesis) as who should say you old foodle!) (3rd parenthesis) inked
her own fingers enormously ( (4th parenthesis) which I told her I was
pleased they were her fingers rather than mine) (4th parenthesis)--But
she only smole. ( (5th parenthesis) Close by was another shop where
they sold hose--( (6th or 7th parenthesis) indiarubber, not knitted)--(
(nth parenthesis) and warranted to let water through, not keep it out);
and I asked for a garden syringe, thinking such things likely to be
kept by hosiers of that sort--and they said they had not any, but found
they had a remnant cheap ( (nnth parenthesis) price 3 shillings) which
is less than many people pay for the other hosiers' hose) (end of
parentheses) a doorpost at the side of the doorway of some place of
business with this remarkable notice:

RULING GIRLS WANTED.

Don't you think you had better apply at once? Jack will give you a
character, I am sure, on the side of the art of ruling, and I will
speak for the science--also of hereditary (on mother's side) instinct.

Well I am not sure about the pen yet--but there is no room for any more.

Ever your loving

Dad.

Epistolary composition on the model of a Gladstonian speech to a
deputation on women's suffrage.

[The other is to his daughter, Mrs. Harold Roller, who had sent him
from abroad a friend's autograph-book for a signature:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 1, 1893.

The epistle of Thomas to the woman of the house of Harold.

1. I said it was an autograph-book; and so it was.

2. And naughty words came to the root of my tongue.

3. And the recording angel dipped his pen in the ink and squared his
elbows to write.

4. But I spied the hand of the lovely and accomplished but vagabond
daughter.

5. And I smole; and spoke not; nor uttered the naughty words.

6. So the recording angel was sold;

7. And was about to suck his pen.

8. But I said Nay! give it to me.

9. And I took the pen and wrote on the book of the Autographs letters
pleasant to the eye and easy to read.

10. Such as my printers know not: nor the postman--nor the
correspondent, who riseth in his wrath and curseth over my epistle
ordinary.

[This to his youngest daughter, which, in jesting form, conveys a good
deal of sound sense, was the sequel to a discussion as to the
advisability of a University education for her own and another boy:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, May 9, 1892.

Dearest Babs,

Bickers and Son have abased themselves, and assure me that they have
fetched the Dictionary away and are sending it here. I shall believe
them when it arrives.

As a rule, I do not turn up when I announce my coming, but I believe I
shall be with you about dinnertime on Friday next (13th).

In the meanwhile, my good daughter, meditate these things:

1. Parents not too rich wish to send exceptionally clever, energetic
lad to university--before taking up father's profession of architect.

2. Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will be well taught classics at
school--not well taught in other things--will easily get a scholarship
either at school or university. So much in parents' pockets.

3. Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will get as much mathematics,
mechanics, and other needful preliminaries to architecture, as he wants
(and a good deal more if he likes) at Oxford. Excellent physical school
there.

4. Splendid Art museums at Oxford.

5. Prigs not peculiar to Oxford.

6. Don Cambridge would choke science (except mathematics) if it could
as willingly as Don Oxford and more so.

7. Oxford always represents English opinion, in all its extremes,
better than Cambridge.

8. Cambridge better for doctors, Oxford for architects, poets,
painters, and-all-that-sort-of-cattle (all crossed out).

9. LAWRENCE WILL GO TO OXFORD and become a real scholar, which is a
great thing and a noble. He will combine the new and the old, and show
how much better the world would have been if it had stuck to Hellenism.
You are dreaming of the schoolboy who does not follow up his work, or
becomes a mere poll man. Good enough for parsons, not for men. LAWRENCE
WILL GO TO OXFORD.

Ever your aggrawatin'

Pa.

[Like the old Greek sage and statesman, my father might have declared
that old age found him ever learning. Not indeed with the fiery
earnestness of his young days of stress and storm; but with the steady
advance of a practised worker who cannot be unoccupied. History and
philosophy, especially biblical criticism, composed his chief reading
in these later years.

Fortune had ceased her buffets; broken health was restored; and from
his resting-place among his books and his plants he watched keenly the
struggle which had now passed into other hands, still ready to strike a
blow if need be, or even, on rare occasions, to return to the fighting
line, as when he became a leader in the movement for London University
reform.

His days at Eastbourne, then, were full of occupation, if not the
occupation of former days. The day began as early; he never relaxed
from the rule of an eight o'clock breakfast. Then a pipe and an hour
and a half of letter-writing or working at an essay. Then a short
expedition around the garden, to inspect the creepers, tend the
saxifrages, or see how the more exposed shrubs could best be sheltered
from the shrivelling winds. The gravelled terrace immediately behind
the house was called the Quarterdeck; it was the place for a brisk
patrolling in uncertain weather or in a north wind. In the lower garden
was a parallel walk protected from the south by a high double hedge of
cypress and golden elder, designed for shelter from the summer sun and
southerly winds.

Then would follow another spell of work till near one o'clock; the
weather might tempt him out again before lunch; but afterwards he was
certain to be out for an hour or two from half-past two. However hard
it blew, and Eastbourne is seldom still, the tiled walk along the
sea-wall always offered the possibility of a constitutional. But the
high expanse of the Downs was his favourite walk. The air of Beachy
Head, 560 feet up, was an unfailing tonic. In the summer he used to
keep a look-out for the little flowers of the short, close turf of the
chalk which could remind him of his Alpine favourites, in particular
the curious phyteuma; and later on, in the folds of the hills where he
had marked them, the English Gentians.

After his walk, a cup of tea was followed by more reading or writing
till seven; after dinner another pipe, and then he would return to my
mother in the drawing-room, and settle down in his particular armchair,
with some tough volume of history or theology to read, every now and
again scoring a passage for future reference, or jotting a brief note
on the margin. At ten he would migrate to the study for a final smoke
before going to bed.

Such was his routine, broken by occasional visits to town on business,
for he was still Dean of the Royal College of Science and a trustee of
the British Museum. Old friends came occasionally to stay for a few
days, and tea-time would often bring one or two of the small circle of
friends whom he had made in Eastbourne. These also he occasionally
visited, but he scarcely ever dined out. The talking was too tiring.

The change to Eastbourne cut away a whole series of interests, but it
imported a new and very strong one into my father's life. His garden
was not only a convenient ambulatory, but, with its growing flowers and
trees, became a novel and intense pleasure, until he began] "to think
with Candide that 'Cultivons notre jardin' comprises the whole duty of
man."

[It was strange that this interest should have come suddenly at the end
of his life. Though he had won the prize in Lindley's botanical class,
he had never been a field botanist till he was attracted by the Swiss
gentians. As has been said before, his love of nature had never run to
collecting either plants or animals. Mere "spider-hunters and
hay-naturalists," as a German friend called them, he was inclined to
regard as the camp-followers of science. It was the engineering side of
nature, the unity of plan of animal construction, worked out in
infinitely varying detail, which engrossed him. Walking once with
Hooker in the Rhone valley, where the grass was alive with red and
green grasshoppers, he said,] "I would give anything to be as
interested in them as you are."

[But this feeling, unknown to him before, broke out in his gentian
work. He told Hooker, "I can't express the delight I have in them." It
continued undiminished when once he settled in the new house and laid
out a garden. His especial love was for the rockery of Alpines, many of
which came from Sir J. Hooker.

Here, then, he threw himself into gardening with characteristic ardour.
He described his position as a kind of mean between the science of the
botanist and the empiricism of the working gardener. He had plenty to
suggest, but his gardener, like so many of his tribe, had a rooted
mistrust of any gardening lore culled from books. "Books? They'll say
anything in them books." And he shared, moreover, that common
superstition, perhaps really based upon a question of labour, that
watering of flowers, unnecessary in wet weather, is actively bad in
dry. So my father's chief occupation in the garden was to march about
with a long hose, watering, and watering especially his alpines in the
upper garden and along the terraces lying below the house. The
saxifrages and the creepers on the house were his favourite plants.
When he was not watering the one he would be nailing up the other, for
the winds of Eastbourne are remarkably boisterous, and shrivel up what
they do not blow down.] "I believe I shall take to gardening," [he
writes, a few months after entering the new house,] "if I live long
enough. I have got so far as to take a lively interest in the condition
of my shrubs, which have been awfully treated by the long cold."

[From this time his letters contain many references to his garden. He
is astonished when his gardener asks leave to exhibit at the local
show, but delighted with his pluck. Hooker jestingly sends him a plant
"which will flourish on any dry, neglected bit of wall, so I think it
will just suit you."]

Great improvements have been going on (he writes in 1892), and the next
time you come you shall walk in the "avenue" of four box-trees. Only
five are to be had for love or money at present, but there are hopes of
a sixth, and then the "avenue" will be full ten yards long! Figurez
vous ca!

[It was of this he wrote on October 1:--]

Thank Heaven we are settled down again and I can vibrate between my
beloved books and even more beloved saxifrages.

The additions to the house are great improvements every way, outside
and in, and when the conservatory is finished we shall be quite
palatial; but, alas, of all my box-trees only one remains green, that
is the "amari," or more properly "fusci" aliquid.

[Sad things will happen, however. Although the local florists vowed
that the box-trees would not stand the winds of Eastbourne, he was set
on seeing if he could not get them to grow despite the gardeners, whom
he had once or twice found false prophets. But this time they were
right. Vain were watering and mulching and all the arts of the
husbandman. The trees turned browner and browner every day, and the
little avenue from terrace to terrace had to be ignominiously uprooted
and removed.

A sad blow this, worse even than the following:--]

A lovely clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in nailing
up, has just died suddenly. I am more inconsolable than Jonah!

[He answers some gardening chaff of Sir Michael Foster's:--]

Wait till I cut you out at the Horticultural. I have not made up my
mind what to compete in yet. Look out when I do!

[And when the latter offered to propose him for that Society, he
replied:--]

Proud an' 'appy should I be to belong to the Horticultural if you will
see to it. Could send specimens of nailing up creepers if qualification
is required.

[After his long battlings for his early loves of science and liberty of
thought, his later love of the tranquil garden seemed in harmony with
the dignified rest from struggle. To those who thought of the past and
the present, there was something touching in the sight of the old man
whose unquenched fires now lent a gentler glow to the peaceful
retirement he had at length won for himself. His latter days were
fruitful and happy in their unflagging intellectual interests, set off
by the new delights of the succidia altera, that second resource of
hale old age for many a century.

All through his last and prolonged illness, from earliest spring until
midsummer, he loved to hear how the garden was getting on, and would
ask after certain flowers and plants. When the bitter cold spring was
over and the warm weather came, he spent most of the day outside, and
even recovered so far as to be able to walk once into the lower garden
and visit his favourite flowers. These children of his old age helped
to cheer him to the last.

***

APPENDIX 1.

As for this unfinished work, suggestive outlines left for others to
fill in, Professor Howes writes to me in October 1899:--

Concerning the papers at South Kensington, which, as part of the
contents of your father's book-shelves, were given by him to the
College, and now are arranged, numbered, and registered in order for
use, there is evidence that in 1858 he, with his needles and eyeglass,
had dissected and carefully figured the so-called pronephros of the
Frog's tadpole, in a manner which as to accuracy of detail anticipated
later discovery. Again, in the early '80's, he had observed and
recorded in a drawing the prae-pulmonary aortic arch of the Amphibian,
at a period antedating the researches of Boas, which in connection with
its discovery placed the whole subject of the morphology of the
pulmonary artery of the vertebrata on its final basis, and brought
harmony into our ideas concerning it.

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