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Title: Thomas Henry Huxley
A Character Sketch
Author: Leonard Huxley
Release Date: March 21, 2005 [EBook #15429]
Language: English
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LIFE-STORIES OF FAMOUS MEN
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
ISSUED FOR THE
RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION,
LIMITED
[Illustration: From a Photograph by Elliott and Fry: Frontispiece]
LIFE-STORIES OF FAMOUS MEN
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
A CHARACTER SKETCH
BY
LEONARD HUXLEY, LL.D.
LONDON:
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.4
1920
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. EARLY DAYS 2
III. MEDICAL TRAINING 13
IV. VOYAGE OF THE "RATTLESNAKE" AND ITS SEQUEL 17
V. LEHRJAHRE 23
VI. VERACITY AND AGNOSTICISM 29
VII. CONTROVERSY AND THE BATTLE OF THE "ORIGIN" 37
VIII. PUBLIC SPEAKING AND LECTURES 43
IX. POPULAR EDUCATION 51
X. EDUCATION; ESPECIALLY OF TEACHERS AND WOMEN 60
XI. METHODS OF WORK 65
XII. SCIENCE AND ETHICS 72
XIII. MORALITY AND THE CHURCH 80
XIV. LIFE AND FRIENDSHIPS 84
XV. CHARLES DARWIN 92
XVI. HOOKER, FORBES, TYNDALL, SPENCER 100
XVII. IN THE FAMILY CIRCLE 111
XVIII. SOME LETTERS AND TABLE-TALK 117
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
ELLIOTT AND FRY _Frontispiece_
FROM A DAGUERROTYPE MADE IN 1846 _To face p._20
PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAULL AND POLYBLANK, 1857 _To face p._44
PORTRAIT FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
DOWNEY, 1890 _To face p._102
I
INTRODUCTORY
The object of a full-dress biography is to present as complete
a picture as may be of a man and his work, the influence of his
character upon his achievement, the struggle with opposing influences
to carry out some guiding purpose or great idea. With abundant
documents at hand the individual development, the action of events
upon character, and of character upon events, can be shown in the
spontaneous freedom of letters, as well as in considered publications.
But this little book is not a full-dress biography, although it may
induce readers to turn to the larger _Life and Letters_, in which
(or in the _Aphorisms and Reflections of T.H. Huxley_) facts and
quotations can be turned up by means of the index; it is designed
rather as a character sketch, to show not so much the work done as
what manner of man Huxley was, and the spirit in which he undertook
that work. It will not be a history of his scientific investigations
or his philosophical researches; it will be personal, while from the
personal side illustrating his attitude towards his scientific and
philosophical thought.
II
EARLY DAYS
Thomas Henry Huxley was born ten years after Waterloo, while the
country was still in the backwash of the long-drawn Napoleonic wars.
It was a time of material reconstruction and expansion, while social
reconstruction lagged sadly and angrily behind. The year of his birth
saw the first railway opened in England; it was seven years before
electoral reform began, with its well-meant but dispiriting sequel
in the new Poor Law. The defeat of the political and aggressive cause
which had imposed itself upon the revolutionary inspiration of freedom
strengthened the old orthodoxies here. Questioning voices were raised
at their proper peril.
Thomas Henry was the seventh child of George Huxley and Rachel
Withers, his wife. He was born on May 4, 1825, at half-past nine in
the morning, according to the entry in the family Bible, at Ealing,
where his father was senior assistant-master in the well-known school
of Dr. Nicholas, of Wadham College, Oxford. The good doctor, who
had succeeded his father-in-law here in 1791, was enough of a public
character to have his name parodied by Thackeray as Dr. Tickleus.
"I am not aware," writes Huxley playfully in an autobiographical
sketch,
that any portents preceded my arrival in this world; but in
my childhood I remember hearing a traditional account of the
manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of great
practical value. The windows of my mother's room were open, in
consequence of the unusual warmth of the weather. For the same
reason, probably, a neighbouring bee-hive had swarmed, and the
new colony, pitching on the window-sill, was making its way
into the room when the horrified nurse shut down the sash. If
that well-meaning woman had only abstained from her ill-timed
interference, the swarm might have settled on my lips, and
I should have been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence
which, in this country, leads far more surely than worth,
capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church and
State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged
to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the
plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no
habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.
The fact that he received the name of the doubting apostle was by no
means one of those superhuman coincidences in which some naive people
see portents. In later years my father used to make humorous play
with its appropriateness, but in plain fact he was named after his
grandfather, Thomas Huxley. I have not traced the origin of the Henry.
Both parents were of dark complexion, and all the children were
dark-haired and dark-eyed. The father was tall, and, I believe, well
set-up: a miniature shows him with abundant, brown, curling hair
brushed high above a good forehead, giving the effect, so fashionable
in 1830, of a high-peaked head. The features are well cut and regular;
the nose rather long and inclined to be aquiline; the cheeks well
covered; the eyes, under somewhat arched brows, expressive and
interesting. Outwardly, there is a certain resemblance traceable
between the miniature and a daguerrotype of Huxley at nineteen;
but the debt, physical and mental, owed to either parent is thus
recorded:--
Physically, I am the son of my mother so completely--even
down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their
appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed
them--that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself,
except an inborn faculty for drawing, which, unfortunately
in my case, has never been cultivated; a hot temper, and
that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers
sometimes call obstinacy.
My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and
energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing
black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more
education than other women of the middle classes in her day,
she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing
characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one
ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive
at any conclusion, she would say: "I cannot help it; things
flash across me." That peculiarity has been passed on to me
in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it
has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a
danger. But, after all, if my time were to come over again,
there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my
inheritance of mother-wit.
Restless, talkative, untiring to the day of her death, she was at
sixty-six "as active and energetic as a young woman." To her he was
devoted.
As a child my love for her was a passion. I have lain awake
for hours crying because I had a morbid fear of her death;
her approbation was my greatest reward, her displeasure my
greatest punishment.
About his childhood, he writes,
I have next to nothing to say. In after years my mother,
looking at me almost reproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah!
you were such a pretty boy!" whence I had no difficulty in
concluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the
matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinct recollection of
certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction that
I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir
Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a
god to us country folk because he was occasionally visited
by the then Prince George of Cambridge. I remember turning my
pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice,
and preaching to my mother's maids in the kitchen as nearly as
possible in Sir Herbert's manner one Sunday morning, when
the rest of the family were at church. That is the earliest
indication of the strong clerical affinities which my friend
Mr. Herbert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy
they have, for the most part, remained in a latent state.
He was not a precocious child, nor pushed forward by early
instruction. His native talent for drawing, had it been cultivated,
might have brought him into the front rank of artists; but on the
perverse principle, then common, that training is either useless to
native capacity or ruins it, he remained untaught, and his vigorous
draughtsmanship, invaluable as it was in his scientific career, never
reached its full technical perfection. But the sketches which he
delighted to make on his travels reveal the artist's eye, if not his
trained hand.
His regular schooling was of the scantiest. For two years, from the
age of eight to ten, he was at the Ealing school. It was a semi-public
school of the old unreformed type. What did a little boy learn there?
The rudiments of Latin, of arithmetic, and divinity may be regarded as
certain. Greek is improbable, and, in fact, I think my father had no
school foundation to build upon when he took up Greek at the age of
fifty-five in order to read in the original precisely what Aristotle
had written, and not what he was said to have written, about his
dissection of the heart.
For the rest, his experience of such a school, before Dr. Arnold's
reforming spirit had made itself felt over the country, is eloquent
testimony to the need of it.
Though my way of life [he writes] has made me acquainted
with all sorts and conditions of men, from the highest to the
lowest, I deliberately affirm that the society I fell into at
school was the worst I have ever known. We boys were average
lads, with much the same inherent capacity for good and evil
as any others; but the people who were set over us cared about
as much for our intellectual and moral welfare as if they were
baby-farmers. We were left to the operation of the struggle
for existence among ourselves; bullying was the least of the
ill practices current among us.
One bright spot in these recollections was the licking of an
intolerable bully, a certain wild-cat element in him making up for
lack of weight. But, alas for justice, "I--the victor--had a black
eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into disgrace
and he did not." A dozen years later he ran across this lad in
Sydney, acting as an ostler, a transported convict who had, moreover,
undergone more than one colonial conviction.
This brief school career was ended by the break-up of the Ealing
establishment. After Dr. Nicholas's death, his sons tried to carry on
the school; but the numbers fell off, and George Huxley, about 1835,
returned to his native town of Coventry as manager of the Coventry
Savings Bank, while his daughters eked out the slender family
resources by keeping school.
Meantime, it does not seem that the boy Tom, as he was generally
called, received much regular instruction. On the other hand, he
learned a great deal for himself. He had an inquiring mind, and a
singularly early turn for metaphysical speculation. He read everything
he could lay hands on in his father's library. We catch a glimpse
of him at twelve, lighting his candle before dawn, and, with blanket
pinned round his shoulders, sitting up in bed to read Hutton's
_Geology_. We see him discussing all manner of questions with his
parents and friends; and, indeed, his eager and inquiring mind made it
possible for him to have friends considerably older than himself. One
of these was his brother-in-law, Dr. Cooke of Coventry, who married
his sister Ellen in 1839. Through Dr. Cooke he became, as a boy,
interested in human anatomy, with results that deeply affected his
career for good and for evil.
The extraordinary attraction [he writes] I felt towards the
intricacies of living structure proved nearly fatal to me at
the outset. I was a mere boy--I think between thirteen and
fourteen years of age--when I was taken by some older student
friends of mine to the first _post-mortem_ examination I ever
attended. All my life I have been most unfortunately sensitive
to the disagreeables which attend anatomical pursuits, but on
this occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings,
and I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut
myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison
supervened; but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember sinking
into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last chance, I
was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of
my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of
Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window,
on the bright spring morning after my arrival, and throwing
open the casement. Life seemed to come back on the wings of
the breeze, and to this day the faint odour of wood-smoke,
like that which floated across the farmyard in the early
morning, is as good to me as the "sweet south upon a bed of
violets." I soon recovered; but for years I suffered from
occasional paroxysms of internal pain, and from that time
my constant friend, hypochondriacal dyspepsia, commenced his
half-century of co-tenancy of my fleshly tabernacle.
In this life-long recurrence of suffering he was like his great friend
and leader, Darwin. Each worked to his utmost under a severe handicap,
which, it must be remembered, in Darwin's case, was by far the
more constant and more disabling, though, happily, an ample fortune
absolved him from the troubles of pecuniary stress.
Years afterwards, one of these "good, kind friends" calls up the
picture of "Tom Huxley looking so thin and ill, and pretending to make
hay with one hand, while in the other he held a German book."
How did he come thus early to teach himself German, a study which was
to have undreamed-of consequences in his future? He learned it so well
that, while still a young man, he could read it--rare faculty--almost
as swiftly as English; and he was one of the swiftest readers I have
known. Thus equipped, he had the advantage of being one of the
few English men of science who made it a practice to follow German
research at first hand, and turn its light upon their own work.
The learning of German was one half of the debt he owed to Carlyle,
the other being an intense hatred of shams of every sort and kind. He
had begun to read the fiery-tongued prophet in his earliest teens, and
caught his inspiration at once. _Sartor Resartus_ was for many years
his Enchiridion (he says), while the translations from the German, the
references to German literature and philosophy, fired him to read the
originals.
As to other languages, his testimonials in 1842 record that he reads
French with facility, and has a fair knowledge of Latin. Thus he took
the _Suites à Buffon_ with him on the _Rattlesnake_ as a reference
book in zoology. As to Latin, he was not content with a knowledge of
its use in natural science. Beyond the minimum knowledge needful
to interpret, or to confer, the "barbarous binomials" of scientific
nomenclature, he was led on to read early scientific works published
in Latin; and in philosophy, something of Spinoza; and later,
massive tomes of the Fathers, whether to barb his exquisite irony in
dissecting St. George Mivart's exposition of the orthodox Catholic
view of Evolution, or in the course of his studies in Biblical
criticism. Of Greek, mention has already been made. He employed his
late beginnings of the language not only to follow Aristotle's work
as an anatomist, but to aid his studies in Greek philosophy and New
Testament criticism, and to enjoy Homer in the original. In middle
life, too, he dipped sufficiently into Norwegian and Danish to grapple
with some original scientific papers. When he was fifteen, Italian as
well as German is set down by him in his list of things to be
learnt, though for some time the pressure of preparing for the London
matriculation barred the way; and on the voyage of the _Rattlesnake_
he spent many hours making out Dante with the aid of a dictionary.
No doubt, also, he must have read some Italian poetry with his wife
during their engagement and early married days, for she had a fair
acquaintance with Italian, as well as equalling his knowledge of
German. When he was past sixty and ill-health, cutting short his old
activities, had sent him to seek rest and change in Italy, he took
up Italian again, and plunged into the authorities on the very
interesting prehistoric archæology of Italy.
To return to his early development. There is extant a fragmentary
little journal of his, begun when he was fifteen, and kept irregularly
for a couple of years. Here the early bent of his mind is clearly
revealed; it prefigures the leading characteristics of his mature
intellect. He jots down any striking thought or saying he comes across
in the course of his reading; he makes practical experiments to test
his theories; above all, his insatiable curiosity to find out the
"why" and "how" of things makes him speculate on their causes, and
discuss with his friends the right and wrong of existing institutions.
This curiosity to make out how things work is common to most healthy
boys; to probe deep into the reasoned "why" is rare. It makes the
practical mechanic into the man of science. Possessing both these
qualities as he did, it is easy to understand his own description of
his early ambitions:--
As I grew older, my great desire was to be a mechanical
engineer, but the fates were against this; and, while very
young, I commenced the study of medicine under a medical
brother-in-law. But, though the Institute of Mechanical
Engineers would certainly not own me, I am not sure that I
have not all along been a sort of mechanical engineer _in
partibus infidelium_. I am now occasionally horrified to think
how little I ever knew or cared about medicine as the art of
healing. The only part of my professional course which
really and deeply interested me was physiology, which is
the mechanical engineering of living machines; and,
notwithstanding that natural science has been my proper
business, I am afraid there is very little of the genuine
naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species
work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the
architectural and engineering part of the business, the
working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands
and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the
modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends.
One or two typical extracts may be given from the _Journal_, which
opens with a quotation from Novalis: "Philosophy can bake no bread;
but it can prove for us God, freedom, and immortality. Which, now, is
more practical, Philosophy or Economy?" Later comes a quotation from
Lessing, which involved a cardinal principle that he claimed for
himself, and demanded of his pupils: accept no authority without
verifying it for yourself:--
I hate all people who want to found sects. It is not error,
but sects--it is not error, but sectarian error, nay, and even
sectarian truth, which causes the unhappiness of mankind.
Electricity interests him specially; among other experiments,
while theorizing upon them, he makes a galvanic battery "in view
of experiment to get crystallized carbon: got it deposited, but not
crystallized."
He is a young Radical in his opposition to anything like injustice,
though frankly admitting that youth is not infallible. One of his
boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if their
qualities were taken away. While on this quest, he got hold of Sir
William Hamilton's _Logic_, and read it to such good effect that when,
years afterwards, he sat down to the greater philosophers, he found
that he already had a clear notion of where the key of metaphysics
lay. The following extract from the _Journal_ shows that he already
had a characteristic point of view:--
Had a long talk with my mother and father about the right to
make Dissenters pay church rates, and whether there ought to
be any Establishment. I maintain that there ought not in both
cases--I wonder what will be my opinion ten years hence? I
think now that it is against all laws of justice to force
men to support a church with whose opinions they cannot
conscientiously agree. The argument that the rate is so small
is very fallacious. It is as much a sacrifice of principle to
do a little wrong as to do a great one.
His friend, George Anderson May, with whom the boy of fifteen has "a
long argument on the nature of the soul and the difference between
it and matter," was then a man of six and twenty, in business at
Hinckley.
I maintained that it could not be proved that matter is
_essentially_, as to its base, different from soul. Mr. M.
wittily said soul was the perspiration of matter.
We cannot find the absolute basis of matter; we only know it
by its properties; neither know we the soul in any other way.
_Cogito ergo sum_ is the only thing that we _certainly_ know.
Why may not soul and matter be of the same substance (i.e.,
basis whereon to fix qualities; for we cannot suppose a
quality to exist _per se_, it must have a something to
qualify), but with different qualities?
Hamilton's analysis of the Absolute, once learned, was never
forgotten. It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the
boy, applied by the man. With the Absolute, an entity stripped of
perceptible qualities, an "hypostatized negation," he could have no
traffic. The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence
became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase
half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put
it, asserts that, philosophically speaking, materialism is but
spiritualism turned inside out.
III
MEDICAL TRAINING
At fifteen and a-half he began his medical training. Engineering, it
seems, was not within his parents' purview; the boy was thoughtful
and scientific; medicine was then the only avenue for science, and
medicine loomed large on their horizon, for two of their daughters
had married doctors. Of these, Dr. Cooke had already begun to give him
instruction in anatomy; it looked as though destiny had marked out his
career.
In those days, the future doctor began by being apprenticed to a
regular practitioner; he picked up a great deal from compounding
medicines, watching out-patients in the surgery, and attending simple
cases, especially if he had a capable man to work under. At the same
time he prepared for his future examinations, and got ready to walk
the hospitals.
This apprenticeship was a strongly formative period in Huxley's life.
He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this
quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal
shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation:
History ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, English Grammar, Chemistry,
Mathematics, Physics, with German also and Physiology, besides
experimental work in natural science, philosophical analysis, and a
copious course of Carlyle.
But this book-work was the least of the influences acting upon
him. Dr. Chandler had charge of the parish doctoring, and the boy's
experiences among the poor in the dock region of the East End left an
ineffaceable mark. It was a grim, living commentary on his Carlyle.
For the rest of his life the cause of the poor appealed vividly to
him, because he had at least seen something of the way in which the
poor lived. People who were suffering from nothing but slow starvation
would come to him for medical aid. One scene above all was burnt into
his memory: a sick girl in a wretched garret, the boy visitor saying
as gently as he could that her sole need was better food, and the
sister of the starved child who turned upon him with a kind of choking
passion, and, pulling from her pocket a few pence and half-pence and
holding them out, cried: "That is all I get for six-and-thirty hours'
work, and you talk about giving her proper food."
When, after a full year, he left Rotherhithe for the north of London,
to be apprenticed--as his elder brother, James, had already been
apprenticed--to his other medical brother-in-law, Dr. Scott, he saw
more of this teeming, squalid life in the filthy courts and alleys
through which he used to pass on his way to the library of the College
of Surgeons.
What, in later life, he tried to do to better this state of things
was not the usual philanthropic work, but the endeavour to
bring intellectual light to the ignorant toilers, to strip away
make-believe, and provide some machinery by which to catch and utilize
capacity.
Great was the change from the surroundings of Rotherhithe to the home
atmosphere of the Scotts. He was now with his favourite sister Eliza,
his senior by twelve years, who was a second mother to him. Her
sympathy and encouragement did much for him; her belief in the future
of "her boy" was redoubled upon his first public success when, at the
age of seventeen, he won the second prize, the silver medal of the
Apothecaries' Company, in a competitive examination in botany. "For a
young hand," he tells us, "I worked really hard from eight or nine in
the morning until twelve at night, besides a long, hot summer's walk
over to Chelsea, two or three times a week, to hear Lindley. A great
part of the time--_i.e._, June and July--I worked till sunrise. The
result was a sort of ophthalmia, which kept me from reading at night
for months afterwards."
The lively and amusing description of the examination and its sequel
is given in full in the _Life_; suffice it to say that when four
o'clock came and only two competitors were left writing hard, and not
half through the paper, they were allowed to go on by general consent.
By eight o'clock the seventeen-year-old came to an end; the older man
went on until nine. This was John Ellerton Stocks, afterwards M.D. and
a distinguished traveller and botanist in India. To him fell the first
prize; the boy, to his own astonishment and the wild delight of his
sister, won the second.
In October, 1812, a couple of months after this success, both he and
his brother James entered Charing Cross Hospital as free scholars.
Here he worked very hard--when it pleased him--took up all sorts of
pursuits and dropped them again, and read everything he could lay
hands upon, including novels. The one instructor by whom he was really
impressed, and for whom he did his utmost, was Wharton Jones, lecturer
on physiology. "He was extremely kind and helpful to the youngster,
who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any right to
do." Wharton Jones assuredly was one of those born teachers who love
to give time and all to a keen and promising pupil. It is good to
know that the bread he cast upon the waters returned to him after many
days. Wharton Jones, too, was responsible for the publication of the
young man's first scientific paper, in the _Medical Gazette_ of 1845.
Investigating things for himself, the student of nineteen had found
a hitherto undiscovered membrane in the root of the human hair, which
received the name of Huxley's layer.
No doubt his work was, as he confesses, not systematically spread over
his various subjects; and his energy was fitful, though it was energy
that struck his contemporaries, who gave the name of the "Sign of
the Head and Microscope" to the familiar silhouette of him as he sat
before a window poring over his dissections, while they swarmed out
into the quadrangle after lectures.
He achieved brilliant successes as a student. In 1843 he won the first
prize in Chemistry, with a note that his "extraordinary diligence
and success in the pursuit of this branch of science do him infinite
honour," as well as the first prize in Anatomy and Physiology. He
was only twenty when, in 1845, he went up for his M.B. at London
University, and won a gold medal in his favourite subjects of Anatomy
and Physiology, being second in that section.
Early in 1846, being still too young to qualify at the College of
Surgeons, yet confronted by the imperative necessity for earning his
own bread, he applied, at the suggestion of his fellow-student,
Lyon Playfair, for service as a naval surgeon, passed the necessary
examination, and went to Haslar. His official chief, old John
Richardson, of Arctic fame, silently kept an eye upon him, and,
failing to get him one of the coveted resident appointments, kept him,
all unaware and ill-content, at Haslar till something worthy of his
scientific abilities should turn up. Seven months passed; then
came the chance of sailing on the surveying and exploring ship
_Rattlesnake_, under Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., brother of the more
famous Dean, who was in want of an assistant-surgeon with a turn for
science.
IV
THE VOYAGE OF THE _RATTLESNAKE_, AND ITS SEQUEL
The three friends, Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley, were alike in this,
that each in his turn began his career with a great voyage of
scientific discovery in one of H.M. ships. Darwin was twenty-two when
the _Beagle_ sailed for the Straits of Magellan; Hooker, also, was
twenty-two when he sailed for the Antarctic with Ross on the _Erebus_;
Huxley was but twenty-one when he set forth with Owen Stanley for
Australian waters to survey the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea.
Each found in the years of distant travel a withdrawal from the
distracting bustle of ordinary life, which enabled him to concentrate
upon original work and to reflect deeply, unhampered by current
doctrines; each came back, not only deeply impressed by the elemental
problems of life, but "salted" with the sea and the discipline of the
sea.
It was good to live under sharp discipline; to be down on the
realities of existence by living on bare necessaries; to find
how extremely well worth living life seemed to be when one
woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank, with the sky for
canopy, and cocoa and weevily biscuit the sole prospect for
breakfast; and, more especially, to learn to work for the sake
of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went to the
bottom and I along with it.
Huxley was not so well situated as either Darwin, the well-to-do
amateur who was naturalist to the expedition, or Hooker, the son of
a distinguished botanist, receiving many privileges from his father's
friend, Captain Ross, while officially he was but an assistant-surgeon
and second naturalist. Huxley had neither friends nor influence beyond
the simple recommendation of "old John" Richardson. Macgillivray, the
naturalist, and the Captain himself had scientific interests, but not
so the other officers, who disliked seeing the decks messed by the
contents of the tow-net. Yet they were "as good fellows as sailors
ought to be, and generally are," though they did not understand why he
should be so zealous in pursuit of the objects which his friends
the middies christened "Buffons," after his volume of the _Suites à
Buffon_. As assistant-surgeon he messed with the middies, but his good
spirits and fun and freedom from any assumption of superiority made
the boys his good comrades.
From the first he was very busy, glorying in the prospect of being
able to give himself up to his favourite pursuits, without thereby
neglecting the proper duties of life. A twenty-eight gun frigate was
anything but a floating palace. The _Rattlesnake_ was badly fitted
out, and always leaky; the lower deck gave a head-space of four feet
ten, which was cramping to a man of five feet eleven; but he had the
run of the commodious chart-room, as arranged for a surveying ship,
and would have had the run of the library if Captain Stanley's
requisition for books had not been "overlooked" by a parsimonious
Admiralty. His tiny cabin was light enough to work in on a dull day;
but as for the possibility of making a scientific collection, it was
but seven feet by six, by five feet six inches high, and infested with
cockroaches to boot.
His work took shape in a mass of drawings and descriptions from the
dissection of the perishable marine organisms of the tropical seas,
and, yet more important, in the new classification he established upon
anatomical grounds. His first papers were sent to the Linnean Society
by Captain Stanley; the later and more important he sent himself to
Edward Forbes, the most interested and helpful of the biologists
to whom he had been introduced before he left England. To his angry
disappointment, no news of them, no acknowledgment even, reached him
on the other side of the world; it was not till he returned, after the
four years of his voyage, that he found they had been published by
the Royal Society, and had established his reputation as a first-rate
investigator. But, though with much difficulty the scientific
authorities enabled him to secure the promised Government grant for
his book, and a temporary billet ashore while he worked at it, he was
only able to publish his _Oceanic Hydrozoa_; a vast quantity of his
researches remained unpublished, and subsequent investigators, going
over the same ground, won the credit for them.
The other scientific interest strongly aroused on the voyage was
anthropology. The cruise of the _Rattlesnake_ provided one of the last
opportunities of visiting tribes who had never before seen a white
man. The young surgeon made a point of getting into touch with these
primitive people at Cape York, and in the islands off New Guinea.
He made a preliminary exploration through the uncharted bush of
Queensland with the ill-fated Kennedy, and all but accompanied him on
his disastrous journey to Cape York, when of all the party only two
were rescued, through the devotion of the faithful native guide. He
exchanged names, and therefore affinities, with a friendly native of
the Louisiades, and learned much at first hand as to their physical
and mental characteristics, which stimulated his subsequent
anthropological work.
The Australian voyage, then, provided a magnificent field for original
research and original thought: the unknown naval surgeon returned from
it to find himself recognized as one of the coming men. Contact
with the larger world had broadened his outlook; the touch of naval
discipline concentrated his powers. But Australia gave him another
gift. He met at Sydney his future wife. The young couple fell in love
almost at first sight, and became engaged. They were of the same age,
22; they hoped to get married when he was promoted to the rank of full
surgeon; they were destined to wait seven-and-a-half years before she
returned home to fulfil his early jesting prophecy of making her a
Frau Professorin. Here, again, was stern disciplining on the part
of destiny. For the first years they were able to meet during the
intervals between the long surveying cruises of the ship; they cheated
the months of separation by keeping journals for each other. But for
nearly five years they were parted by twelve thousand miles of sea,
and, worse, by slow sailing ships, when letters would take five months
or more to receive an answer, which by that time might be entirely at
cross purposes with the changed aspect of affairs. The possibilities
of estrangement were incalculable. Their lives were developing on
entirely different lines. He had been admitted to the inmost circle of
men of science as an intellectual peer; he was elected F.R.S. when
he was barely twenty-six, and received the Royal Medal the following
year, as well as being chosen to serve on the Council of the Society;
he wrote; he lectured at the Royal Institution. And yet, with all the
support of the leaders in science, he could not find any post wherein
to earn his bread and butter. He stood for professorships at
Toronto, at Sydney, at Aberdeen, Cork and King's College, London.
The Admiralty, in March, 1854, even refused further leave for the
publication of the scientific work to do which he had been sent out.
He took the bull by the horns, and, rather than return to the hopeless
routine of a naval surgeon, let the Admiralty fulfil their threat to
deprive him of his appointment, and the slender pay which was his
only certain support. His scientific friends besought him to hold on;
something must come in his way, and a brilliant career was before him;
but was he justified, he asked himself again and again, in pursuing
the glorious phantom, so miserably paid at the best, instead of taking
up some business career, perhaps in Australia, and ending the cruel
delay which bore so hardly upon the woman he loved? Yet would not this
be a desertion of his manifest duty, his intellectual duty to himself
and to Science? He knew full well that there was only one course which
could bring him either hope or peace, and yet, between the two calls
upon him, he never knew which course he would ultimately follow.
[Illustration: From a Daguerrotype made in 1846]
For her there was no such mental development. Assuredly she kept up
her literary pursuits, her study of German, in which they had found
common ground of interest, for she had spent two years at school in
Germany; but she was cribbed and cabined by the ups and downs of early
colonial life, and the fluctuating ventures upon which her father
delighted to embark; there was, naturally, no possibility of her
moving in the stimulating intellectual society which was his, and
hope deferred wore upon her as the laurels of scientific success were
consistently followed by failure in all solid prospects. Yet neither
possible misunderstandings, nor actual disappointments, had power to
shake the foundations of their mutual trust, and the inspiration of
the ideal which each built on the other's so different character; the
one more compact of fire, the other more of noble patience, different,
but alike in a largeness of soul and freedom from pettiness, which
made their forty years of united life something out of the common. She
believed in him; in the darkest season of disappointment she bade him
remember that a man should pursue those things for which he is most
fitted, let them be what they will. Her "noble and self-sacrificing"
words brought him comfort, and banished "the spectre of a wasted
life that had passed before him--a vision of that servant who hid his
talent in a napkin and buried it."
At last the gleams of promise, which had begun to gather, broke
through the clouds. On the sudden death of Professor Jamieson, his
good friend Edward Forbes was called away in the spring of 1854 to
take the Edinburgh professorship. At a few days' notice Huxley was
lecturing as Forbes's substitute at the Royal School of Mines. In July
he was appointed permanently, with a salary for his course of £100
a year. A few days later his income was doubled. Forbes had held two
lectureships; the man who had accepted the other drew back, and it
was given to Huxley. In August he was "entrusted with the Coast Survey
Investigations under the Geological Survey," becoming the regular
Naturalist to the Survey the following year, with pay of £200,
afterwards increased to £400, rising to £600. The way was clear; the
Heathorn family had already determined to come home. Miss Heathorn had
been very ill; she was still far from strong, and, indeed, one gloomy
doctor only gave her six months to live. The lover defied him: "I
shall marry her all the same;" but the gloomy doctor was alone in his
opinion, and, indeed, she lived till she was nearly eighty-nine. The
marriage, which was to bring so much active happiness in a life of
much struggle and stress, was celebrated on July 1, 1855. They had
become engaged at twenty-two; they had waited and striven for eight
years; they were rewarded by forty years of mutual love and support.
V
LEHRJAHRE
The award of the Royal Medal was felt by Huxley to be a turning-point.
It was something which convinced the "practical" people who used to
scoff at his "dreamy" notions, and brought them to urge him on a more
"dreamy" course than ever he dreamed of. "However," he remarks, "I
take very much my own course now, even as I have done before--Huxley
all over." Without being blinded by any vanity, he saw in the award
and the general estimate in which it was held a finger-post showing
as clearly as anything can what was the true career lying open before
him. Ambitious in the current sense of worldly success he was not. The
praise of men stirred a haunting mistrust of their judgment and his
own worthiness. Honours he valued as evidences of power; but no more.
What possessed him was, as he confessed in a letter meant only for
the eye of his future wife, "an enormous longing after the highest and
best in all shapes--a longing which haunts me and is the demon which
ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing
his behests." With the sense of power stirring within him, he
refused to be beholden to any man. Patronage he abhorred in an ago
of patronage. He was ready to accept a helping hand from any one who
thought him capable of forwarding the great cause in ever so small a
way; but on no other terms. If the time had come to speak out on any
matter, he was resolved to let no merely personal influence restrain
him. He cared only for the praise or blame of the understanding few.
Whatever the popular judgment, he knew there was a work to be done and
that he had power to do it; and this was his personal ambition--to
do that work in the world, and to do it without cant and humbug and
self-seeking. Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he
confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of "her
boy"; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet
surely in no mere spirit of boasting. He "left his mark somewhere,
clear and distinct," without taint of the insincerities which he had
an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of his own.
It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley
did from the original line of investigation he had taken up. Friends
warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies.
If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which
his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal
Medal, he would easily be the first in his field. But what he did was
in great part of set purpose. He was no mere collector of specimens,
no mere describer of species. He sought the living processes which
determined natural groups; the theories he formed needed verification
in various directions. These excursions from the primary line of
research were of great value in broadening the basis of his knowledge.
He also deliberately set aside the years 1854-60 as a period in which
to make himself master of the branches of science cognate to his own,
so that he should be ready for any special pursuits in any of them.
For he did not know what was to be his task after the work that had
fallen to him, not of his own choice, at the School of Mines. He was
to ground himself in each department by monographic work, and by
1860 might fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years of
"Meisterjahre," when, with the comprehensive views arising from such
training, it should be possible to give a new and healthier direction
to all biological science. Meanwhile, opportunities must be seized at
the risk of a reputation for desultoriness.
But the irony of circumstances diverted much of his energy into yet
more diverse fields. When Sir Henry de la Beche first offered him the
posts of Palæontologist and Lecturer on Natural History vacated by
Professor Forbes, he says:--
I refused the former point blank, and accepted the latter
only provisionally, telling Sir Henry that I did not care for
fossils, and that I should give up Natural History as soon as
I could get a physiological post. But I held the office
for thirty-one years, and a large part of my work has been
palæontological.
Palæontology was his business, and he became a Master in it also,
with the result that he forged himself a mighty weapon for use in the
struggle over the Origin of Species.
In one of his later Essays he compares the study of human physiology
to the Atlantic Ocean:--
Like the Atlantic between the Old and the New Worlds, its
waves wash the shores of the two worlds of matter and of mind;
its tributary streams flow from both; through its waters, as
yet unfurrowed by the keel of any Columbus, lies the road, if
such there be, from the one to the other; far away from that
North-West Passage of mere speculation in which so many brave
souls have been helplessly frozen up.
Such was the spirit in which, after his long day's work, he added to
his labours in physical science a search in another, and to his notion
a cognate province of thought and speculation. Many a sleepless night
in these years the candle was lighted beside his bed, and for a couple
of hours after midnight he would devour works on philosophy--English,
German, and French, and occasionally Latin. To a mind at once
constructive and intensely critical of unsound construction he added a
quality possessed by few professed philosophers--a large knowledge of
the workings of life, of the human thinking machine, in addition
to various other branches of physical science. As he put it, the
laboratory is the forecourt to the temple of philosophy. For the
method of the laboratory is but the strict application of the one
sound and fruitful mode of reasoning--the method of verification by
experiment. Evidence must be tested before being trusted. The first
duty of such a method is to question in order to find good reason;
Goethe's "tätige Skepsis," a scepticism or questioning which seeks to
overcome itself by finding good standing-ground beyond. Authority as
such is nothing till verified anew. The creeds of ancient sages, the
dogmas of more modern date, must equally bear the light of widening
knowledge and the tests that prove the gold or clay of their
foundations, the stability of the successive steps by which they
proceed.
In all this reading Huxley found nothing to shake what he had learnt
long before from Hamilton--the limits set to human knowledge and
the impossibility of attaining to the ultimate reality behind the
phenomena presented to our cognition. The problems of philosophy, set
forth with unsurpassed clearness for all who will read in our great
English writers, were not solved by soaring into intellectual mists.
To those who declared they had attained this ultimate knowledge by
their own inner light or through an alleged revelation in historical
experience, the question remained to be put: How do you verify your
assertion? Is the historical evidence on which you build trustworthy?
And if in certain departments this evidence is clearly untenable,
what guarantee have you that in other departments evidence of similar
character is tenable? The fine-spun abstractions of the Platonists
and their kin, unchecked by a natural science which had not yet the
appliances necessary for its growth; the orthodoxies of the various
churches, so singularly differentiated in the course of development
from the simplicity of their nominal founder--these were based upon
assumptions for which the seeker after reasoned evidence could find no
valid support. Ten years before he coined the word "Agnostic" to label
his attitude towards the unproved, whether likely or unlikely, in
contradistinction to the Gnostics, who professed to "know" from within
apart from external proof, Huxley described the Agnostic position he
had already reached--the position of suspending judgment where actual
proof is not possible; the attitude of mind which regards the words
"I believe" as a momentous assertion, not to be uttered on incomplete
grounds. Writing to Charles Kingsley in 1860, he says:--
I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no
reason for believing in it; but, on the other hand, I have no
means of disproving it.
Pray understand that I have no à priori objections to the
doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature
can trouble himself about à priori difficulties. Give me such
evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and
I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half
so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the
indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates
all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have
no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its
marvellousness. But the longer I live the more obvious it is
to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say
and to feel, "I believe such and such to be true." All the
greatest rewards, and all the heaviest penalties of existence,
cling about that act. The universe is one and the same
throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling
some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I
shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not
rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great
mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms.
It is of no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities.
I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the
inverse square, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon
weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.
From such a point of view intellectual veracity takes on a moral
aspect; indeed, it is a pillar of morality. Disregard of it has led
to incalculable social wrong and individual suffering, oppressions and
persecutions, unprogressive obscurantism, joined with perverted ideals
and intellectual arrest. "Ecrasez l'infâme," cried the reforming
Voltaire; his "infamous" was very much this perverting influence,
exaggerated and armed with power, which had made the great
organization of the Roman Church in his time a monstrous instrument of
autocratic tradition, cruel, rapacious, blindly intolerant, jealous
of light and liberty. In England the growth of political liberty had
deprived the darkest lights of the Church of almost all power for
active interference in the administration of the State, though the
pressure of traditionalism exercised itself less crudely, if scarce
less surely, in the Universities, the Press, religious opinion, and
the army of conventional respectability. So strong was it in social
influence that a man, openly professing to make a guide of his reason
instead of his parson, was liable to be pushed outside the pale.
VI
VERACITY AND AGNOSTICISM
One of the most ticklish of all subjects to handle at this period was
the position of the human species in zoological classification. "It
was a burning question in the sense that those who touched it were
almost certain to burn their fingers severely." In the fifties Sir
William Lawrence had been well-nigh ostracized for his book _On
Man_, "which now might be read in a Sunday-school without surprising
anybody." When Huxley submitted the proofs of _Man's Place in Nature_
to "a competent anatomist, and good friend of his," asking him, if he
could, to point out any errors of fact, the friend--it was Lawrence
himself--declared he could find none, but gave an earnest warning as
to the consequences of publication. Here was one of the cases
where Huxley's firm resolution applied--to speak out if necessary,
regardless of consequences; indeed, he felt sure that all the evil
things prophesied would not be so painful to him as the giving up
that which he had resolved to do upon grounds which he conceived to be
right. As he wrote later (in 1876):--
It seemed to me that a man of science has no _raison d'être_
at all unless he is willing to face much greater risks than
these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and
further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for
much--they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of
letters, for example.
The book was published, and the friend's forecast was amply justified.
The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of
misrepresentation and ridicule for some years, and I was even
as one of the wicked. Indeed, it surprises me at times to
think how any one who had sunk so low could since have emerged
into, at any rate, relative respectability. Personally, like
the non-corvine personages in the Ingoldsby legend, I did not
feel "one penny the worse." Translated into several languages,
the book reached a wider public than I had ever hoped
for; being largely helped, I imagine, by the Ernulphine
advertisements to which I referred. It has had the honour of
being freely utilized without acknowledgment by writers of
repute; and, finally, it achieved the fate, which is the
euthanasia of a scientific work, of being enclosed among the
rubble of the foundations of later knowledge, and forgotten.
To my observation, human nature has not sensibly changed
during the last thirty years. I doubt not that there are
truths as plainly obvious, and as generally denied, as
those contained in _Man's Place in Nature_, now awaiting
enunciation. If there is a young man of the present generation
who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that
they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling
his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus.
_Veritas praevalebit_--some day; and even if she does not
prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and
wiser for having tried to help her. And let him recollect
that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and
pains.
To speak out thus was one side of his passion for veracity. When it
was a matter of demonstrable truth, he refused to be intimidated by
great names. Already, in his Croonian lecture of 1858, "On the
Theory of the Vertebrate Skull," he had challenged, and by direct
morphological investigation overthrown, the theory of Oken, adopted
and enlarged upon by Owen, that the adult skull is a modified
vertebral column. Again, the great name of Owen, that jealous king of
the anatomical world, had in 1857 supported the assertion, so contrary
to the investigations of Huxley himself and of other anatomists, that
certain anatomical features of the brain are peculiar to the genus
_Homo_, and are a ground for placing that genus separately from all
other mammals--in a division, Archencephala, apart from and superior
to the rest. Huxley thereupon re-investigated the whole question, and
soon satisfied himself that these structures were not peculiar to man,
but are common to all the higher and many of the lower apes. This led
him to study the whole question of the structural relations of man to
the next lower existing forms. Without embarking on controversy, he
embodied his conclusions in his teaching.
Thus, in 1860, he was well prepared to follow up Darwin's words in the
_Origin of Species_, "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and
his history," and to furnish proofs in the field of Development and
Vertebrate Anatomy, which were not among Darwin's many specialities.
When Owen, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, repeated
his former assertions, he publicly took up the challenge. On the
technical side, a series of dissections undertaken by himself,
Rolleston, and Flower displayed the structures for all to see; on the
popular side, Huxley delivered in 1860 a course of public lectures
which were the basis of his book, _Man's Place in Nature_, above
mentioned.
Here the principle is actively exemplified: speak out fearlessly at
the right moment to strike down that which is demonstrably false. It
is the counterpart to the other aspect of veracity which will not say
"I believe" to an unverified assertion. These two aspects of the
same principle, as has been seen, developed hand in hand in his early
career; but it was the active challenge to ill-based authority which,
by its courage, not to say audacity, first attracted public notice
and public abuse. The other, the apparently negative aspect, came into
general notice only after 1869. Its very reserves, however, resting on
a statement of reasons for finding the testimony to certain doctrines
insufficient, had long provoked assaults from the upholders of these
doctrines, which made no less call upon his courage and endurance.
As a philosophic position, however, it was not formally and publicly
defined until, in the debates of the Metaphysical Society founded in
that year, he invented for himself the label of Agnostic. The Society
was composed of distinguished men, representing almost every shade of
opinion and intellectual occupation; University professors, statesmen,
lawyers, bishops and deans, a Cardinal, a poet; men of science and
men of letters; Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Positivists,
Freethinkers.
The story is told in his article on "Agnosticism," written in 1889
(_Collected Essays_, v, 237). After describing how it came about that
his mind "steadily gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and
Kant," so well stated by the latter as follows:--
The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of
pure reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves
not as an organon for the enlargement (of knowledge), but as
a discipline for its delimitation; and, instead of discovering
truth, has only the modest merit of preventing error--
he proceeds:--
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask
myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a
materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I
found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was
the answer, until, at last, I came to the conclusion that
I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations
except the last. The one thing in which most of these good
people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed
from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain
"gnosis"--had, more or less successfully, solved the problem
of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a
pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.
And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself
presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion....
This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a
place among the members of that remarkable confraternity
of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and
pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of
philosophical and theological opinion was represented
there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my
colleagues were _-ists_ of one sort or another; and, however
kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of
a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of
the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox
when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he
presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the
appropriate title of "Agnostic." It came into my head as
suggestively antithetic to the "Gnostic" of Church history,
who professed to know so much about the very things of which I
was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading
it at our Society to show that I, too, had a tail like the
other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when
the _Spectator_ had stood godfather to it, any suspicion
in the minds of respectable people that a knowledge of its
parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely
lulled.
Of his share in the debates the late Prof. Henry Sidgwick gives the
following account:--
There were several members of the Society with whose
philosophical views I had, on the whole, more sympathy; but
there was certainly no one to whom I found it more pleasant
and more instructive to listen. Indeed, I soon came to the
conclusion that there was only one other member of our Society
who could be placed on a par with him as a debater, on the
subjects discussed at our meetings; and that was, curiously
enough, a man of the most diametrically opposed opinion--W. G.
Ward, the well-known advocate of Ultramontanism. Ward was by
training, and perhaps by nature, more of a dialectician;
but your father was unrivalled in the clearness, precision,
succinctness, and point of his statements, in his complete and
ready grasp of his own system of philosophical thought, and
the quickness and versatility with which his thought at once
assumed the right attitude of defence against any argument
coming from any quarter. I used to think that while others of
us could perhaps find, on the spur of the moment, _an_ answer
more or less effective to some unexpected attack, your father
seemed always able to find _the_ answer--I mean the answer
that it was reasonable to give, consistently with his general
view, and much the same answer that he would have given if he
had been allowed the fullest time for deliberation.
The general tone of the Metaphysical Society was one of
extreme consideration for the feelings of opponents, and your
father's speaking formed no exception to the general harmony.
At the same time, I seemed to remember him as the most
combative of all the speakers who took a leading part in
the debates. His habit of never wasting words, and the edge
naturally given to his remarks by his genius for clear and
effective statement, partly account for this impression;
still, I used to think that he liked fighting, and
occasionally liked to give play to his sarcastic
humour--though always strictly within the limits imposed by
courtesy. I remember that on one occasion, when I had read
to the Society an essay on "The Incoherence of Empiricism," I
looked forward with some little anxiety to his criticisms;
and when they came I felt that my anxiety had not been
superfluous; he "went for" the weak points of my argument in
half-a-dozen trenchant sentences, of which I shall not
forget the impression. It was hard hitting, though perfectly
courteous and fair.
The paper to be read at each meeting of the Society was printed
and circulated in advance, so that all might be prepared with their
arguments. Discussion followed the dinner at which the members met.
Of these papers Huxley contributed three, the titles of which
sufficiently indicate the fundamental points on which his criticism
played, questioning current axioms in its search for trustworthy
evidence of their validity. The first (1869) was on "The Views of
Hume, Kant, and Whately on the Logical Basis of the Doctrine of
the Immortality of the Soul," showing that these thinkers agreed in
holding that no such basis is given by reasoning apart, for instance,
from revelation. The argument is summarized in the essay on Hume
(_Coll. Ess._, vi, 201; 1878).
The second was "Has a Frog a Soul? and if so, of what Nature is that
Soul?" (1870), a physiological discussion as to the seat of those
purposive actions of which the animal is capable after it has lost
ordinary volition and consciousness by the removal of the front part
of its brain. Are these things attributes of the soul, and are
they resident not even in the brain, but in the spinal marrow? If
metaphysics starts from psychology, psychology itself depends greatly
upon physiology; current theories need reconsideration. This paper
was the starting-point for his larger essay on "Animals as Automata,"
delivered as an address before the British Association in 1874.
The third paper (1876) was on "The Evidence of the Miracle of the
Resurrection," as to which he, so to say, moved the previous question,
arguing that there was no valid evidence of actual death having taken
place. The paper was the result of an invitation on the part of some
of his metaphysical opponents. As he rejected the miraculous, they
asked him to write on a definite miracle, and explain his reasons for
not accepting it. He chose this subject because, in the first place,
it was a cardinal instance; and, in the second, that as it was a
miracle not worked by Christ himself, a discussion of its genuineness
could not possibly suggest personal fraud and so inflict gratuitous
pain upon believers in it. The question of the fundamentals of
Christian evidences had long been in his mind; it was no new subject
to him when in the eighties, debarred by his health from physiological
researches, he extended his work on Biblical studies.
If the Metaphysical Society effected nothing else, it brought about
a personal _rapprochement_ between the representatives of opposing
schools of thought. It became clear to the older school that the new
thinkers had by no means failed, as they suspected, to examine the
older doctrines. Theirs was not dishonest doubt, but a strong demand
for better evidence. If the Society itself "died of too much love," it
may well have contributed to the greater amenity of public discussion
as the years passed, and the diminution of the former rabid
denunciations which waned as the new doctrines spread, and were even
absorbed and digested by their former antagonists.
VII
CONTROVERSY AND THE BATTLE OF THE "ORIGIN"
The piercing clearness of mind described by Prof. Sidgwick, which
could not express itself otherwise than trenchantly and drove straight
at the heart of the subject, gave Huxley the popular reputation of
being above all things a controversialist. Naturally enough, the
public knew little and cared less for the unspectacular researches
among the Invertebrates, which had won such high scientific fame.
They were only stirred when the results of study in geology, in
fossil forms and simian anatomy, clashed with long-established
popular conceptions. There was also a gladiatorial delight in watching
controversy not simply abstract, but fanned by personal conviction,
which marked the champions above all as good fighters.
It must be noted, however, that, vigorous as he was in carrying war
into the enemy's country, on two occasions only did Huxley set forth
without being first personally attacked. One was his review of
the _Vestiges of Creation,_ when he was irritated by the writer's
"prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind."
If it had any influence on me at all [he writes], it set me
against Evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of
conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery, is one I
wrote on the _Vestiges_ while under that influence (1854).
The other was his controversy in 1885-6 with Mr. Gladstone, over the
account of the creation in Genesis. But, at least, this was a reply
to Mr. Gladstone's attack upon M. Réville and his applications of
scientific methods to the problem.
Nevertheless, in this and the similar controversies on Biblical
subjects, his chief aim was not simply to confute his adversary. To
demolish once more the legend of the Flood, or the literal truth of
the Creation myth, in which a multitude of scholars and critics and
educated people generally had ceased to believe, was not an otiose
slaying of the slain. It made people think of the wider questions
involved. To riddle the story of the Gadarene swine was to make a
breach in the whole demonology of the New Testament and its claims to
superior knowledge of the spiritual world.
It may be noted in passing that, however hard he hit in these
controversies, he never descended to anything which would merely wound
and offend cherished convictions. His own feelings forbade ribaldry,
and abuse disgusted him, on whichever side employed. He declined to
admit that rightful freedom of discussion is attacked when a man is
prevented from coarsely and brutally insulting his neighbours' honest
beliefs. And this apart from the question of bad policy, inasmuch
as abuse stultifies argument. But if prosecutions for blasphemy
are permitted, it would be but just to penalize some of the
anti-scientific blasphemers for their coarse and unmannerly attacks on
opinions worthy of all respect.
For the rest, as he humorously remarks, when he began in early days to
push his researches into the history and origin of the world and its
life, he invariably ran up against a sign-board with the notice, "No
Thoroughfare--By Order--Moses." Geology and Biology were shut in by a
ring-fence; the universe beyond was a Forbidden Land, guarded by the
Lamas of ecclesiastical authority.
The first great clash with this authority, which focussed attention
upon the scientific struggle for freedom of thought, was that which
followed the publication of the _Origin of Species_ at the end of
1859, and culminated in the debate with the Bishop of Oxford at the
Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860. A fierce but more
limited struggle for freedom of criticism within the pale of the
Church was to follow the publication of _Essays and Reviews_ (1860)
and Bishop Colenso's examination of the Pentateuch in 1862 and
onwards.
The first of these episodes was to have the widest consequences on
thought at large. Huxley early had an opportunity of commending the
book to the public. The reviewer of the _Times_, knowing nothing about
the subject, was advised to entrust the work to him, adding only the
opening paragraphs himself. But it was his retort to the Bishop of
Oxford six months later which publicly proclaimed how boldly the
challenge of authority was to be taken up. The story is well known;
how the Bishop came down on the last day of the Association meeting to
"smash Darwin." Crowds gathered to hear the great orator, who was also
reputed to carry scientific weight as having taken a high mathematical
degree. He knew nothing directly of the subject, but apparently
had been coached up, somewhat inadequately, by Owen, his guest at
Cuddesdon, who did not put in an appearance at the meeting that day,
but whose hand was also apparent in the Bishop's _Quarterly_ article
that was published a few days later.
After several merely rhetorical speakers had been cut short by the
chairman, Henslow, who ruled that scientific discussion alone was in
order, the Bishop rose in response to calls from the audience, and
"spoke for full half-an-hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness, and
unfairness," wrote Hooker.
He ridiculed Darwin badly and Huxley savagely; but all in such
dulcet tones, so persuasive a manner, and in such well-turned
periods, that I, who had been inclined to blame the President
for allowing a discussion that could serve no scientific
purpose, now forgave him from the bottom of my heart.... In a
light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there
was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what
rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist
with a smiling insolence, he begged to know was it through
his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent
from a monkey.
Here the Bishop left the vantage ground of any pretence to scientific
discussion, and descended to tasteless personalities. Here was the
opportunity for an equally personal retort, which would show an
audience, for the most part neither of a mind nor of a mood to follow
closely argued reasonings, that personalities were not argument, and
that ridicule is a two-edged weapon. As he spoke these words
Huxley turned to Sir Benjamin Brodie, who was sitting next him, and
whispered: "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands."
The Bishop sat down; but Huxley, though directly attacked, did
not rise until the meeting called for him. Then he "slowly and
deliberately arose; a slight, tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet
and very grave." He began with a general statement in defence of
Darwin's theory. "I am here only in the interests of science, and
I have not heard anything which can prejudice the case of my august
client." Darwin's theory was an explanation of phenomena in Natural
History, as the undulatory theory was of the phenomena of light. No
one objected to the latter because an undulation of light had never
been arrested and measured. Darwin offered an explanation of facts,
and his book was full of new facts, all bearing on his theory. Without
asserting that every part of that theory had been confirmed, he
maintained that it was the best explanation of the origin of species
which had yet been offered. As to the psychological distinction
between men and animals, and the question of the Creation: "You say
that development drives out the Creator; but you assert that God made
you: and yet you know that you yourself were originally a little piece
of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case." Nobody
could say at what moment of the history of his development man became
consciously intelligent. The whole question was not so much one of a
transmutation or transition of species as of the production of forms
which became permanent. The Ancon sheep was not produced gradually;
it originated in the birth of the original parent of the whole stock,
which had been kept up by a rigid system of artificial selection.
But if the question were to be treated, not as a matter for the calm
investigation of science, but as a matter of sentiment, and if he were
asked whether he would choose to be descended from the poor animal of
low intelligence and stooping gait who grins and chatters as we pass,
or from a man endowed with great ability and a splendid position, who
should use these gifts to discredit and crush humble seekers after
truth, he must hesitate what answer to make.
The actual words were not taken down at the time; they were finely
eloquent, and gained effect from the clear, deliberate utterance; but
the nearest approach to them was recorded in a letter of J.R. Green,
the future historian, written immediately after the meeting:--
I asserted--and I repeat--that a man has no reason to be
ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were
an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it
would rather be a _man_--a man of restless and versatile
intellect--who, not content with (an equivocal[1]) success in
his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions
with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them
by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his
hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions
and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
[Footnote 1: Referring to this letter afterwards, my father felt
certain that he had never used the word "equivocal." In this he was
borne out by Prof. Victor Carus and Prof. Farrar, who were present.]
The effect was electrical. When he first rose to speak he had been
coldly received--no more than a cheer of encouragement from his
immediate friends. As he made his points the applause grew. When he
finished one half of the audience burst into a storm of cheers; the
other was thunderstruck by the sacrilegious recoil of the Bishop's
weapon upon his own head: a lady fainted, and had to be carried out.
As soon as calm was restored Hooker leapt to his feet, though he hated
public speaking yet more than his friend, and drove home the main
scientific arguments with his own experience on the botanical side.
The Bishop, be it recorded, bore no malice. Orator and wit as he was,
he no doubt appreciated a debater whose skill in fence matched his
own.
VIII
PUBLIC SPEAKING AND LECTURES
For Huxley, one result of the affair was that he became universally
known, and not merely as he had been known to his immediate circle,
as the most vigorous defender of Darwin--"Darwin's bulldog," as he
playfully called himself. Another result was that he changed his idea
as to the practical value of the art of public speaking. Walking away
from the meeting with that other hater of speech-making, Hooker, he
declared that he would thenceforth carefully cultivate it, and try to
leave off hating it. The former resolution he carried out faithfully,
with the result that he became one of the best speakers of his
generation; in the latter he never quite succeeded. The nervous horror
before making a public address seldom wholly left him; he used to
say that when he stepped on the platform at the Royal Institution and
heard the door click behind him, he knew what it must be like to be
a condemned man stepping out to the gallows. Happily, no sign of
nervousness ever showed itself; he gave the appearance of being
equally master of himself and of his subject. His voice was not
strong, but he had early learnt the lesson of clear enunciation. There
were two letters he received when he began lecturing, and which he
kept by him as a perpetual reminder, labelled "Good Advice." One was
from a "working man" of his Monday evening audience in Jermyn Street,
in 1855; the other, undated, from Mr. Jodrell, a great benefactor of
science, who had heard him at the Royal Institution. These warned him
against his habits of lecturing in a colloquial tone, which might suit
a knot of students gathered round his table, but not a large audience;
of running his words, especially technical terms, together, and of
pouring out unfamiliar matter at breakneck speed. These early faults
were so glaring that one institute in St. John's Wood, after hearing
him, petitioned "not to have that young man again." He worked hard
to cure himself, and the later audiences who flocked to his lectures
could never have guessed at his early failings. The flow was as clear
and even as the arrangement of the matter was lucid; the voice was
not loud, but so distinct that it carried to the furthest benches.
No syllable was slurred, no point hurried over. All this made for
the lucid and comprehensible; well-chosen language and fine utterance
shaped a perfect vehicle of thought. But it was the lucidity of the
thought itself, thus expressed, that gave his lectures their quality.
A clever and accomplished lady once, in intimate conversation, asked
Mrs. Huxley what the reason could be that every one praised her
husband so highly as a lecturer. "I can't understand it. He just lets
the subject explain itself, and that's all." Profound, if unintended,
compliment. It was his power of seeing things clearly, stripped of
their non-essentials, that enabled him to make others see them
clearly also. Nor did he forget the saying of that prince of popular
expositors, Faraday, who, when asked, "How much may a popular lecturer
suppose his audience knows?" replied emphatically, "Nothing." This
same faculty, no doubt, was that which enabled him to write such
admirable elementary text-books--a task which he regarded as one of
the most difficult possible.
A notable description of his public lecturing in the seventies and
early eighties is given by G. W. Smalley, correspondent of the _New
York Tribune_, in his "London Letters":--
[Illustration: From a Photograph by Maull and Polyblank, 1857; To face
p. 44]
I used always to admire the simple and businesslike 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.... 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
magnetized 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.... 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.
Equally perfect of their kind were his class lectures, which made a
deep and lasting impression on his students. In the words of Jeffery
Parker, afterwards his assistant:--
His lectures 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 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.
It was no wonder that he was clear and exact in his class lectures,
for he based what he had to say on his own experiment and observation,
and was at pains to verify experimentally the observations of others
which came within his field. Without verification he would not rely
upon them. Indeed, he was so careful to give nothing at second hand
that one of his scientific friends gently reproached him for wasting
his time in re-investigating matters already worked over by competent
observers. "Poor ----," he remarked afterwards, "if that is his own
practice, his work will never live." Of his most important public
addresses, two may be noted as especial _tours de force_. On each
occasion it was specially necessary to speak by the book, but at the
last moment it was impossible to use the carefully prepared notes. One
was the address on the complex and difficult subject of "Animals as
Automata," at the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 1874,
when the atmosphere was electrical after a Presidential address by
John Tyndall which set theologians in an uproar. Years afterwards he
described the incident to Sir E. Ray Lankester:--
I knew that I was treading on very dangerous ground, so I
wrote out uncommonly full and careful notes, and had them in
my hand when I stepped on to the platform.
Then I suddenly became aware of the bigness of the audience,
and the conviction came upon me that, if I looked at my notes,
not one half would hear me. It was a bad ten seconds, but I
made my election and turned the notes face downwards on the
desk.
To this day I do not exactly know how the thing managed to
roll itself out; but it did, as you say, for the best part of
an hour and a-half.
There's a story _pour vous encourager_ if you are ever in a
like fix.
The other was his address at the opening of the John Hopkins
University at Baltimore in 1876. Late on the preceding afternoon he
returned very tired from an expedition to Washington, to find that a
formal dinner and reception awaited him in the evening. He snatched
an hour or two of rest, when a New York reporter arrived demanding the
text of the address, which had to be sent to New York for simultaneous
publication with the Baltimore papers. Now the address was not written
out; it was to be delivered from notes only. From these notes, then,
he delivered it _in extenso_ to the reporter, who took it down in
shorthand, and promised to let him have a copy to lecture from next
morning. But the fair copy did not come till the last moment. To his
horror he found this was written out upon "flimsy," from which it
would be impossible to read properly. Again he turned it down on the
desk and boldly trusted to memory. This second version was taken down
verbatim by the Baltimore reporters in their turn. What if it did not
tally with the New York version? As a matter of fact, it was
almost identical, save for a few curious discrepancies, apparent
contradictions between professed eye-witnesses which the ingenious
critic might perfectly well use to prove that both accounts were
fictitious, and that the pretended original was never delivered under
the conditions alleged.
Mention has been made of his lectures to working men. Of these his
assistant and successor, Professor G.B. Howes, wrote:--
Great as were his class lectures, his working-men's were
greater. Huxley was a great 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 position 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.
He had begun these in 1855, the second year of his appointment at the
Royal School of Mines. On February 27 of that year he wrote to his
friend Dr. Dyster:--
I enclose a prospectus of some People's Lectures (_Popular_
Lectures I hold to be an abomination unto the Lord) I am about
to give here. I want the working classes to understand that
Science and her ways are great facts for them--that physical
virtue is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean
and temperate and all the rest, not because fellows in black
with white ties tell them so, but because these are plain and
patent laws of nature which they must obey "under penalties."
I am sick of the _dilettante_ middle class, and mean to try
what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among
facts.
And in May, after referring to his Preliminary Course and the
earnestness and attention of his audience, he adds that he has begun
his similar course to working men exclusively--a series of six, given
in turn by each Professor:--
The theatre holds 600, and is crammed full. I believe in the
fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze
and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I
would willingly give some when I come to Tenby [Dr. Dyster's
home].
Moreover, he took a practical interest in the corresponding movement
set afoot by F.D. Maurice, and gave occasional addresses at the
Working Men's College between 1857 and 1877, the last of which was
that delightful discourse on science as "trained and organized common
sense" which bears the alluring title of "The Method of Zadig."
IX
POPULAR EDUCATION
These lectures to working men, no less than his profound interest and
exhausting work on behalf of popular education, illustrate his intense
belief that science is not solely a thing of the laboratory, but a
vital factor in right living. It was still true that the people perish
for want of knowledge. And as he said when talking of posthumous fame:
"If I am to be remembered at all, I should like to be remembered as
one who did his best to help the people."
Nor did he lack appreciation among those whom he tried thus to aid.
Professor Mivart tells the following story:--
I recollect going [in 1874] 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!"
Another story is told by Mr. Raymond Blaythwayt:--
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 has done me and
my like a lot of good; no man more."
In these special lectures of his very best and in his other essays,
which, however far-reaching, were always intelligible to plain
readers, may be seen one side of his desire to spread clear thinking
among the less instructed masses; another was his work on the first
School Board. By 1870 his health was already shaken by the heavy work
which filled his days and nights; nevertheless, whatever the cost in
time and labour and health, he felt it imperative to try, with all his
power, to give rational shape to the new lines of universal education,
and to revivify it with the fresh breath of the new renascence in
aim and method. Science must be represented in the new Parliament
of Education, and there was no one else ready to undertake the part.
Moreover, he had already enjoyed some practical experience of the
workings of elementary education while examiner under the Science and
Art Department, the establishment of which he considered
a measure which came into existence unnoticed, but which will,
I believe, turn out to be of more importance to the welfare of
the people than many political changes over which the noise of
battle has rent the air.
On the proper working of the new Act depended the physical, moral, and
intellectual betterment of the nation; in particular, "book-learning"
needed to be tempered with not merely handcraft, but with something
of the direct knowledge of nature; for in itself, if properly applied,
this is an admirable instrument of education, and by its method
promotes an attitude of mind capable of understanding the reasons for
the vast changes at work in human thought.
Accordingly, he stood as a candidate for Marylebone, and, without
canvassing, for which he had neither time nor inclination, he was
elected second on the list. He had addressed several meetings, and,
as an amplification of his election address, he included extracts from
his forthcoming article, "The School Boards: What They Can Do, and
What They May Do," which were sent to the papers by the editor of
the _Contemporary Review_. (See _Coll. Ess._, iii, 374.) Here was
his programme, a great part of which he saw carried out:--Physical
training, for health and as a basis for further training; Domestic
training, especially for girls; Moral training, in a knowledge of
moral and social laws, and an engaging of the affections for what is
good instead of what is evil; Intellectual training, in knowledge and
the means of acquiring knowledge, alike for practical purposes and for
recreation.
The opponents of popular education raised their still familiar outcry
about "cramming children full of nonsense" and "unfitting them for
the state of life to which they were called." But one cannot say what
state of life they may be called to without opportunity of testing
their capacities, and as for cramming them with nonsense, such a
scheme, if properly carried out, ought rather to expel nonsense. Above
all, it set the interests of humanity above the mere development of
skill, which would simply turn the child of man into the subtlest
beast of the field.
True education, he declared, was impossible without "religion," the
unchanging essence of which lies in the love of some ethical ideal to
govern and guide conduct, "together with the awe and reverence which
have no kinship with base fear, but rise whenever one tries to pierce
below the surface of things, whether they be material or spiritual."
It was in this sense that he advocated Bible-reading in
schools--simple Bible-reading, without theological gloss. On the one
hand, this was the only workable plan under existing circumstances.
True, that he would not have employed the Bible as the agency for
introducing the religious and ethical idea in a system that could
begin with a clean slate. He believed that the principle of strict
secularity in State education is sound and must ultimately prevail.
But moral instruction must not be too rudely divorced from the system
of belief current among the generality; and the Bible had been the
instrument of the clergy of all denominations, to whose efforts the
mass of half-instructed people owed such redemption from ignorance and
barbarism as they possessed. Make all needful deductions, and there
remains a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur, interwoven with
three centuries of our history. The Bible, as English literature, as
old-world history, as moral teaching, as the Magna Charta of the poor
and of the oppressed, the most democratic book in the world, could not
be spared. The mass of the people should not be deprived of the
one great literature which is open to them; not shut out from the
perception of their relations with the whole past history of civilized
mankind, nor from an unpriestly view of Judaism and Jesus of Nazareth,
purged of the accretions of centuries. Accordingly, he supported Mr.
W.H. Smith's motion for Bible-reading, even against the champions of
immediate secularization; but for Bible-reading under such regulations
as would carry out for the children the intention of Mr. W.E.
Forster, the originator of the Education Act, that "in the reading and
explanation of the Bible... no efforts will be made to cram into their
poor little minds theological dogmas which their tender age prevents
them from understanding."
But the compromise was not permanently satisfactory. In 1893-94 the
clerical party on the School Board "denounced" the treaty agreed to
in 1871, and up till then undisputed, in the expectation of securing
a new one more favourable to themselves; and the _Times_, hurrying to
their support, did not hesitate to declare in a leading article that
"the persons who framed the rule" respecting religious instruction
intended to include definite teaching of such theological dogmas as
the Incarnation.
In a letter to the _Times_ Huxley replied (April 29, 1893):--
I cannot say what may have been in the minds of the framers
of the rule; but, assuredly, if I had dreamed that any such
interpretation could fairly be put upon it, I should have
opposed the arrangement to the best of my ability.
In fact, a year before the rule was framed I wrote an
article in the _Contemporary Review_, entitled "The School
Boards--what they can do and what they may do," in which
I argued that the terms of the Education Act excluded such
teaching as it is now proposed to include.
And this contention he supported by the quotation from Mr. W.E.
Forster, given above.
Further, in October, 1894, he replied as follows to a correspondent
who had asked him whether flat adhesion to the compromise had not
made nonsense of a certain Bible lesson, which was the subject of much
comment:--
I am at one with you in hating "hush up" as I do all other
forms of lying; but I venture to submit that the compromise
of 1871 was not a "hush up." If I had taken it to be such, I
should have refused to have anything to do with it....
There has never been the slightest ambiguity about my position
in the matter; in fact, if you will turn to one paper on the
School Board written by me before my election in 1870, I
think you will find that I anticipated the pith of the present
discussion.
The persons who agreed to the compromise did exactly what all
sincere men who agree to compromise do. For the sake of
the enormous advantage of giving the rudiments of a decent
education to several generations of the people, they accepted
what was practically an armistice in respect of certain
matters about which the contending parties were absolutely
irreconcilable.
To return to his activity on the School Board. His vigorous work as
chairman of the committee appointed to frame an educational scheme was
marked by great breadth of view. He desired the elementary schools
to be linked at the one end with infant schools; at the other with
continuation schools and some scheme for technical education. A
perfect scheme would provide what he first called a ladder from the
gutter to the university, whereby children of exceptional capacity
might reach the places for which nature had fitted them. His sense of
fitness would have welcomed even more warmly some system whereby the
incompetent born into the higher strata of the social organism should
be automatically graded down to the positions more appropriate to
their wits and character. But this is an ideal only possible in
Plato's State, where philosophers are kings and possess superhuman
power of intuition.
Sincerity is sometimes impracticable. But here sincerity was combined
with common-sense practicality, and even an opponent like Lord
Shaftesbury was impelled to write in his journal:--"Professor Huxley
has this definition of morality and religion: 'Teach a child what is
wise: that is _morality_. Teach him what is wise and beautiful: that
is _religion!_' Let no one henceforth despair of making things clear
and of giving explanations!"
He did not, however, disguise his fundamental opposition to
Ultramontanism, that intellectual and social _imperium in imperio_,
with its basic hostility to the free scientific spirit. This he had
already expressed in his "Scientific Education" (_Coll. Ess._, iii,
111), an address of 1869, and he repeated it towards the end of his
service on the School Board when opposing a bye-law that the Board
should pay over direct to denominational schools the fees for poor
children--to schools, that is, outside the Board's control. He opposed
it partly because it would assuredly lead to repeated contests on
the Board; partly because it would give a handle to that party whose
system, as set forth in the syllabus, of securing complete possession
of the minds of their flock, was destructive of all that was highest
in the nature of mankind and inconsistent with intellectual and
political liberty.
The committee did excellent work in systematizing important matters
and leaving minor arrangements to the local managers; in apportioning
essential and discretionary subjects, and--what was of special
interest to its chairman--the teaching of elementary geography
and elementary social economy, and in particular the systematized
object-lessons, embracing a course of elementary construction in
physical science, and serving as an introduction to the courses for
the examinations under the Science and Art Department. Science, as he
declared, was assuming such a position alike in practical life and in
thought that any one totally ignorant of it would be at a disadvantage
in both spheres. Moreover, the proposed technical schools--for applied
science, that is--must suffer if they had to deal with pupils who had
no preliminary grounding in the principles of physical science. His
early advocacy of music and drawing, not to produce artists, but to
develop personality, also bore some fruit. The man of science, too,
was found defending Latin as a discretionary subject, alternatively
with a modern language. Latin was the gate to many things, and, apart
from the question of overloading the curriculum, there was great
danger if educational possibilities were not thrown open to all
without restriction. There is no more frightful "sitting on the safety
valve" than in denying men of ability the means of rising to the
positions for which their talents and industry might qualify them.
As for the compulsory element in education and the justification for
levying rates and taxes for what objectors called "educating other
people's children," his answer was: "Every ignorant person tends to
become a burden upon, and, so far, an infringer of the liberty of, his
fellows, and an obstacle to their success. Under such circumstances
an education rate is, in fact, a war tax, levied for purposes of
defence."
In all this it was his attitude towards the child which deeply
impressed his colleagues in whom child-sympathy was strongest. As the
Rev. Benjamin Waugh put it, he was on the Board to establish schools
for the children. He wanted to turn them into sound men and women, and
resented the idea that schools were to train either congregations for
churches or hands for factories. "What he sought to do for the child
was for the child's sake, that it might live a fuller, truer, worthier
life."
After fifteen months of service on the School Board superadded to the
heavy strain of his ordinary work, his health broke down utterly, and
he resigned. But after his retirement his successors found that their
duty was "to put into practice the scheme of instruction which Huxley
was mainly instrumental in settling. We were thus able indirectly to
improve both the means and methods of teaching.... The most important
developments and additions have been in the direction of educating the
hand and eye.... Thus the impulse given by Huxley in the first months
of the Board's existence has been carried forward by others." So wrote
Dr. J. H. Gladstone in 1896. The tide of education has swelled since
then and is still swelling, but its main direction is the same.
NOTE
As these pages are passing through the press, I note an appeal for
money by the Religious Tract Society, which is running short of funds
to keep up the number and quality of the 6-7,000 Bibles annually
awarded as prizes to elementary school children. This advertisement
fills more than half a column of the _Times_ of March 25, 1920. It is
headed in bold type, PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE BIBLE, and, opening
with the words "All who value the teaching of the Holy Bible will
appreciate this wonderful description of the Bible by Professor
Huxley," proceeds to quote the eloquent passage, referred to above on
p. 54, from "The School Boards, etc." (_Coll. Ess_., iii, 396).
This testimony to the interest of the Bible outside its theological
applications is detached from its context as a spur to "all those who
value the Word of God... to send the Society help in [its] work of
extending Bible teaching in our Elementary Schools."
But these words were written with grave qualifications, especially
as to the need of excluding doctrinal teaching. By suppressing these
qualifications the Secretaries of the Religious Tract Society
approve themselves denizens of the world of half-truths, along with
puff-writers and similar experts.
X
EDUCATION: ESPECIALLY OF TEACHERS AND OF WOMEN
The third of his excursions into the field of education, in his
burning desire to give the people that right knowledge for want of
which they perish, was the training of the teachers who prepared
pupils for the examinations of the Science and Art Department. The
future of scientific teaching depended upon the proper supply of
trained teachers. Now, the School of Mines in Jermyn Street was
without a laboratory in which to make even his own students work out
with their own hands the structure of the biological "types" expounded
in the lectures. An opportunity to train these new "scientific
missionaries" came in 1871, when he was deep in the great schemes of
elementary education. More than a hundred of them flocked to South
Kensington, where some large rooms on the ground floor of the museum
had been secured and rigged up for the purpose by the Professor and
his three demonstrators. For six weeks in the summer there was a
daily lecture, followed by four hours' laboratory work under the
demonstrators, in which the students verified for themselves facts
which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate
pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of
the more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One
clergyman, who had for years conducted classes in physiology under the
Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under
the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture
in Huxley's _Physiology_."
From 1872 onwards, when the School of Mines removed bodily to new
buildings at South Kensington, Huxley had a fine laboratory of his
own, in which not only were these teachers taught, but he was able
to adopt the same method with the students in his regular courses--a
method for long universally adopted in detail as well as in principle.
The first and unchangeable principle was to make the student verify
every fact for himself; to be satisfied with nothing at second hand.
The system was to work over a chosen set of biological types, each
representing a well-marked group and providing comparisons one
with another as well as stepping stones to further investigations.
Originally he started the series with the simplest organisms, and
proceeded to the more complex; but, though a good philosophical order,
it had the disadvantages of requiring the beginner to have much skill
in handling the microscope, and of proceeding from the less known
organism to the better known. Starting with the latter, the beginner
would know better what to look for. His demonstrator, Jeffery Parker,
argued the point vigorously with Huxley, and finally persuaded him
to invert the series, with great success, albeit other lecturers
preferred to keep to his original arrangement.
Education, furthermore, owes him a great debt for his long and active
work upon the Royal Commissions on the Royal College of Science for
Ireland, on Science and Art Instruction in Ireland, on Scientific
Instruction and the Advancement of Science; on Vivisection, to inquire
into the Universities of Scotland, and on the Medical Acts--all in the
sixteen years between 1866 and 1882. At the London University, also,
he was an examiner for many years, and in the early nineties he strove
hard to give it a new constitution, first as a member of the Senate,
and then as president of a reforming Association. It is noteworthy,
too, that ten years earlier he was elected a Governor of Eton College,
and in the short time before his health broke down a second time he
did something to aid science-teaching there and to make drawing a
general subject.
In the general need for education he ranked high the need for the
education of women. As early as 1860 he wrote: "I don't see how we are
to make any permanent advancement while one-half of the race is
sunk, as nine-tenths of women are, in mere ignorant parsonese
superstitions." If only people would not bring up their daughters as
man-traps for the matrimonial market, the next generation would see
women fit to be the companions of men in all their pursuits; "though,"
he added, "I don't think that men have anything to fear from their
competition." On this point he remarked five years later: "Nature's
old salique law will never be repealed, and no change of dynasty will
be effected, though whatever argument justifies a given education for
boys justifies its application to girls as well."
A letter of 1874, touching the first efforts of women to qualify as
doctors, prefigures what has been done since for the higher education
of women:--
Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the
average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally,
as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are
much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and
I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or
public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most
foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of
vigour and capacity. We have heard a great deal lately about
the physical disabilities of women. Some of these alleged
impediments, no doubt, are really inherent in their
organization, but nine-tenths of them are artificial--the
products of their modes of life. I believe that nothing would
tend so effectually to get rid of these creations of idleness,
weariness, and that "over-stimulation of the emotions" which,
in plainer-spoken days, used to be called wantonness, than
a fair share of healthy work, directed towards a definite
object, combined with an equally fair share of healthy play
during the years of adolescence; and those who are best
acquainted with the requirements of an average medical
practitioner will find it hardest to believe that the attempt
to reach that standard is likely to prove exhausting to an
ordinarily intelligent and well-educated young woman.
Twenty years later he supported the entry of women into public life
in a plainly reasoned letter, which he himself thought highly
complimentary, although a number of estimable ladies flew at him for
writing it:--
The best of women are apt to be a little weak in the great
practical arts of give-and-take and putting up with a beating,
and a little too strong in their belief in the efficacy of
government. Men learn about these things in the ordinary
course of their business; women have no chance in home life,
and the boards and councils will be capital schools for them.
Again, in the public interest it will be well; women are more
naturally economical than men, and have none of our false
shame about looking after pence. Moreover, they don't job for
any but their lovers, husbands, and children, so that we know
the worst.
Directly, then, as teacher, lecturer, and essayist indirectly as
organizer, he ranks among the great educators of his age. But he did
not establish a "school" of his own; such a thing was abhorrent to
him. A resolute seeker after truth, he bade others seek also; but he
refused to impose his own conclusions on any man.
Of all possible positions [he wrote in 1892], that of master
of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears
to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British
matron cannot look upon followers with a more evil eye than I
do. Such acquaintance with the history of thought as I
possess has taught me to regard school, parties, and sects as
arrangements, the usual effect of which is to perpetuate
all that is worst and feeblest in the master's, leader's,
or founder's work; or else, as in some cases, to upset it
altogether; as a sort of hydrant for extinguishing the fire
of genius, and for stifling the flame of high aspirations, the
kindling of which has been the chief, perhaps the only, merit
of the protagonist of the movement. I have always been, am,
and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever
proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned,
thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but
do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own
laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions
the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.
In fact, what his teaching stood for was not so much the thing taught
as the method by which facts should be observed and conclusions drawn
from them. As science, in his definition, is but trained and organized
common sense, so this method, the scientific method, is but the
ordinary common-sense method rigidly carried out. And the correlative
to this method is the attitude of mind that suspends judgment until
adequate proof is forthcoming.
XI
METHODS OF WORK
Of his method of work something has already been said, recalling his
insistence upon verifying, experimentally, all statements made by
others which he wished to employ in his lectures. This was true not
only of his daily teaching, but of any new research that interested
him. He repeated the series of Pasteur's experiments for himself
before making a pronouncement on the much-debated question of
spontaneous generation. A curious by-result of these investigations
was that the Admiralty requested him to track down the cause of great
trouble in the Navy--namely, that the ship's biscuit, though carefully
prepared and packed in tins, was constantly found, when the tins were
opened, to be full of maggots.
His far-ranging work in Comparative Anatomy was based upon dissections
by his own hand, executed rapidly and broadly, going straight to the
essential point without any finikin elaboration, and recorded in
very fine anatomical drawings. Indeed, his power of clear and rapid
draughtsmanship was the other side of his unusual power of visualizing
a conception. Each faculty helped the other, and one of the most
striking examples of his memory of forms was when, before a delighted
audience, he traced on the blackboard the development of some complex
structure, showing, stroke upon stroke, the orderly transition from
one form to the next.
Until failing health forbade work with the microscope, he was
continually busy with the rational re-grouping of animal forms.
Besides his published works on the anatomy of both the Invertebrates
and the Vertebrates, whether manuals of anatomy or monographs of
special groups or general essays, and his work of classifying birds
and reptiles and fishes on new principles, there exists among the vast
number of drawings and notes preserved at the Huxley Laboratory at
South Kensington a quantity of unpublished and unfinished work which,
in detail, often anticipates the work of subsequent investigators, and
which, for the most part, represents fresh studies of special
groups of animals to be used in a general classification such as was
suggested in his paper "On the Application of the Laws of Evolution
to the arrangement of the Vertebrata, and more particularly of the
Mammalia" (1880)--"the most masterly," remarks Professor Howes, "of
his scientific theses; the only expression which he gave to the world
of the interaction of a series of revolutionary ideas and conceptions
(begotten of the labours of his closing years as a working zoologist)
which were at the period assuming shape in his mind. They have done
more than all else of their period to rationalize the application of
our knowledge of the Vertebrata, and have now left their mark for all
time on the history of progress, as embodied in our classificatory
systems." But neither this great work nor the other special monographs
still in hand reached completion. His health broke down; he could
no longer stoop over the microscope, and had perforce to abandon
zoological work before he was sixty.
A remark made by Huxley about others is very true of himself--that
what matters most is not the microscope, but the man behind it;
not the objects seen, but the interpretation of them and their
relationships. The outward and the inward eye had the same quickness,
the same highly developed sense of form and relationship, backed by a
store of living knowledge; so well organized that it could respond
at once to any suggestion which would throw light on undiscovered
affinities and provide a true base for classification.
While much of his bookwork and writing was done at home, his later
anatomical work was done at his laboratory. As official engagements
multiplied, his time was much broken into; but he snatched every
available moment, often dashing down to South Kensington in a cab for
a half-hour of work between two official meetings. His absorption
in his studies was intense--as at one time he signs himself to his
fellow-worker, W. K. Parker, "Ever yours amphibially," so Jeffery
Parker, his demonstrator, who tells the story, came to him with a
question about the brain of the codfish at a time when he was deep in
the investigation of some invertebrate group. "Codfish?" he replied;
"that's a vertebrate, isn't it? Ask me a fortnight hence, and I'll
consider it."
One more note concerning his method of work. His love of visualizing
his problems regularly led him to make charts to show geographically,
say, the distribution of certain forms of life over the globe, or to
illustrate points of history--such, for example, as a coloured map
of the Aegean, with fifty-mile circles drawn from the centre of the
Cyclades to illustrate the range of Greek civilization as it spread
over the shores of Asia and Europe. And as in writing a book he was
careful first to plan out the scheme of it and the balance of the
parts, so, however much his public addresses gave the impression of
being largely impromptu, he had always thought out carefully every
word he meant to say. "There is," he said, "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."
Yet his was not a strong verbal memory. It was essentially a memory
for facts; he could tear the heart out of a book as swiftly as a
Macaulay, packing the facts into the framework of his knowledge,
and always knowing thereafter where to find his facts or verify his
references. In his speeches it was the compelling thought seeking
expression, and fitting the form of expression exactly to the form
of the thought, that brought the meditated words so infallibly and so
spontaneously to his lips: they were already welded together in mind.
But he had not that kind of memory which, after once reading a page
of a book, can recite the whole word for word, whether prose or verse.
Single phrases embodying a notable image would remain with him, and
remain ready for use as allusive colour or pointed epigram. Many of
these were Biblical phrases, for he knew his Bible well, and admired
not only the grandeur of thought to be found enshrined in it, but its
magnificence as a treasure-house of our English tongue. And, apart
from many scientific terms of his invention, he coined divers words
and phrases which have enriched our language, such as "Agnostic,"
"the ladder from the gutter to the university," the descriptions of
Positivism as "Catholicism without Christianity," and the Salvation
Army methods as "Corybantic Christianity."
His working day began soon after nine, for he was never one of those
people who can do hours of work before breakfast. The working day,
however, regularly went on until midnight, and, as has been mentioned,
was often prolonged by late reading.
The speed with which his mind worked to see through complex questions
and spring swiftly to a conclusion was such that he contrived to do
four ordinary men's work in a single lifetime. But this swiftness of
reaching a conclusion, so useful at most times, was liable sometimes
to betray him. If, however, he found that he had made a mistake, he
was ready to confess the fact. The most celebrated instance of this
was the story of _Bathybius_. In 1868, while soundings were being made
in connection with the laying of the Atlantic cable, certain specimens
of mud were dredged up. The mud was sticky, owing to the presence of
innumerable lumps of a transparent gelatinous substance. This was
in fine granules, which possessed neither a nucleus nor a covering
membrane. Scattered through it were calcareous coccoliths. Such
were the facts; what inference was to be drawn? The only thing this
substance resembled was one of the many simple forms of oceanic life
recently found and described by the great zoologist Haeckel.
I conceive [wrote Huxley] that the granulate heaps and the
transparent gelatinous matter in which they are embedded
represent masses of protoplasm. Take away the cysts which
characterize the _Radiolaria_, and a dead _Sphærozoum_ would
very nearly represent one of this deep-sea "Urschleim," which
must, I think, be regarded as a new form of those simple
animated beings which have recently been so well described by
Haeckel in his _Monographie der Moneras_.
So it received the name of Bathybius Haeckelii.
The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all
that it seemed to be. But the specimens examined by himself and by
Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description
of _Bathybius_, were seen only in a preserved state. It was dredged up
again on the voyage of the _Porcupine_ and examined in a fresh state
by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. W.B. Carpenter, but they found no
better explanation to give of it. Doubt only arose when, in 1879, the
_Challenger_ expedition failed to find it very widely distributed, as
expected, over the sea bottom; and the behaviour of certain specimens
gave good ground for suspecting that what had been sent home before
as genuine deep-sea mud was a precipitate due to the action on
the specimens of the spirit in which they were preserved. Though
Haeckel--his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of
a close parallel near Greenland in 1876--would not desert Bathybius,
the rest of its sponsors gave it up. The evidence in this particular
case was tainted. At the meeting of the British Association in 1879
Huxley came forward and took occasion to "eat the leek" in a speech as
witty as it was candid.
Now, _Bathybius_ had often been pointed to as an example of almost
primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have
begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise
limitations of the matter, seized upon the _Bathybius_ recantation as
a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most
noteworthy case of this, eleven years later, Huxley retorted:--
That which interested me in the matter was the apparent
analogy of _Bathybius_ with other well-known forms of lower
life.... Speculative hopes or fears had nothing to do with
the matter, and if _Bathybius_ were brought up alive from the
bottom of the Atlantic to-morrow the fact would not have
the slightest bearing that I can discern upon Mr. Darwin's
speculations, or upon any of the disputed problems of biology.
As to the eating of the leek, he had commended it many a long
year before to an over-impetuous German friend who had read enough
Shakespeare to understand the meaning of the phrase:--
Well, every honest man has to do that now and then, and I
assure you that, if eaten fairly and without grimaces, the
devouring of that herb has a very wholesome cooling effect on
the blood, particularly in people of a sanguine temperament.
Reflections on making mistakes lead to a striking conclusion:--
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in
their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to
acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
Until he reached middle age, his quickness of thought and decision was
fretted by men of slower mind if they happened to be associated with
him on some enterprise, and to certain colleagues his ardour was
sometimes almost terrifying. And in those days also, before custom had
hardened him, he was apt to be short with those devoid of any claim
to intervene who thrust themselves into his affairs. Salutary as this
doubtless was to the really ignorant meddler, there was one occasion,
of which I learnt thirty years later, where at bottom the rebuke was
not deserved. The sufferer, admittedly devoid of anatomical knowledge,
questioned the statement in an early edition of _The Elementary
Physiology_ as to the method in which the voice is produced, and
propounded a different movement in part of the larynx. The Professor
replied to the effect that the writer had better learn some anatomy
before challenging the result of careful experiment. But some years
later, as a result of further investigation, this same change was made
in a new edition of the book. By that time the very name of the critic
was forgotten. But if he and his suggestion had been remembered, I am
inclined to think that he would have received an _amende_.
XII
SCIENCE AND ETHICS
Huxley's work in education was his direct contribution to the social
improvement of the world. Not instruction merely--for, "though
under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that
over-instruction may be a worse"--but through education, the bringing
out of the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual
citizen, which is the one condition of the success of a State. And
this condition, resting on the basic faith in veracity, he felt to be
above all the work of science, the Cinderella of thought. For, as he
wrote:--
If the diseases of Society consist in the weakness of its
faith in the existence of the God of the theologians, in a
future state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as
the doctors say, is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose
bickerings about things of which they know nothing have
been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that
evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the
unknowable.
Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these
high matters. She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and
provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is
a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in
her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair
of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order
which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great
drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror,
but also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself
before her eyes; and she learns, in her heart of hearts, the
lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have done, once
and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that
for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible
propositions about things beyond the possibilities of
knowledge.
She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the
adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this
or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in
that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization
upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical
disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively
faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.
In a world the elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror,
goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as
neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so
bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now
and again, to discover that it can be."
On the one side, the optimistic dogma that this is the best of all
possible worlds is little better than a libel on possibility. On
behalf of the modified optimism that benevolence is on the whole the
regulating principle of the sentient world, it may be granted that
there are hosts of subtle contrivances devoted to the production of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain; but, if so, why is it not equally
proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no less
necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are
evidences of malevolence? Translating these facts into moral
terms, the goodness of the hand that aids Blake's "little lamb" is
neutralized by the wickedness of the other hand that eggs on his
"tiger burning bright," and the course of nature will appear to be
neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.
On the other side, though this may not be the best of all possible
worlds, to say that it is the worst is "mere petulant nonsense."
With a courage based on hours and days of personal knowledge, he
exclaims:--
There can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person
that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well
with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their
way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and
all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or
of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every
twenty-four--a supposition which many tolerably vigorous
people know, to their cost, is not extravagant--the burden
of life would have been immensely increased without much
practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any
manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse
conditions than these.
Moreover, another fact utterly contradicts the hypothesis that the
sentient world is directed by malevolence:--
A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and
the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are, to all
appearance, unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so
to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who
experience them, few delights can be more entrancing than
such as are afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts, and
especially by music; but they are products of, rather than
factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known,
in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of
mankind.
To speak, then, of the course and intention of nature in terms
of human thought, we must say that its governing principle is
intellectual and not moral. It is a logical process materialized, with
pleasures and pains that fall, in most cases, without the slightest
reference to moral desert.
From the moralist's point of view the animal world, in which our own
cosmic nature has been severely trained for millions of years, is no
better than a gladiatorial show, and we cannot expect, within a few
centuries, to subdue the masterfulness of this inborn tendency, in
part necessary to our existence, to purely ethical ends. So deep
rooted is it that the struggle may last till the end of time. But, he
exclaims with a ringing note--
I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will,
guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in
common effort, may modify the conditions of existence for a
period longer than that now covered by history. And much may
be done to change the nature of man himself. The intelligence
which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful
guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards
curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.
In the long struggle pain and sorrow are inevitable. The aim of man
is not to escape these, but rather to earn peace and self-respect. To
this he added a special point, in a letter of 1890:--
If you will accept the results of the experience of an old
man who has had a very chequered existence--and has nothing
to hope for except a few years of quiet downhill--there
is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human
affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection, except
the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and
light, to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of
all sorts. That was the lesson I learned from Carlyle's books
when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life.
The animal world, then, having the principle of its existence in a
state of war, society was created by the first men who substituted
the state of mutual peace for the state of mutual war. The object of
society was the limitation of the struggle for existence. That shape
of society most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of
individual against individual is most strictly limited. Happiness
and freedom of action are restricted to a sphere where they do not
interfere with the happiness and freedom of others; the common weal
becomes an essential part of individual welfare. In short, even if
under the most perfect conditions "Witless will always serve his
master," man aims to escape from his place in the animal kingdom,
founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral
evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man governed upon the
principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral end,
but in its perfection social life is embodied morality. Moral purpose
is "an article of exclusively human manufacture--and very much to our
credit."
To society, then, its members owe a vital debt; for society, the work
of the ethical man, has slowly and painfully built up around us a
fabric of defence against barbarism, the work of the non-ethical man.
This debt we are bound to repay by furthering in ourselves the good
work of human fellowship, and by striving to improve the conditions
of our social life; and the means thereto are self-discipline,
self-support, intelligent effort, not unreasoning violence with its
disruption of the defences against anarchic barbarism.
Yet if society, in making life easier, multiplies the species in
excess of the means of subsistence, it raises up within itself, in
the intensest form, the unlimited struggle for existence. "This is the
true riddle of the Sphinx, and every nation which does not solve
it will, sooner or later, be devoured by the monster itself has
generated."
Improvement there has been during the historical period: with goodwill
and clear thought Huxley looked for ever-accelerating improvement,
though contemporary civilizations seemed neither to embody any worthy
ideal nor even to possess the merit of stability. In the atmosphere
of plain verity, where, as he said, "my business is to teach my
aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts
harmonize with my aspirations," he confidently looked for the hopes of
the future; but were it not so, he solemnly declared--
If there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of
the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the
increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over
Nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows
that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and
the intensity of want, with its concomitant physical and moral
degradation among the masses of the people, I should hail the
advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole affair
away as a desirable consummation.
In the matter of personal conduct he rejected the notions that the
moral government of the world is imperfect without a system of future
rewards and punishments, and that such a system is indispensable to
practical morality. "I believe," he said, "that both these dogmas are
very mischievous lies."
There is no need for future compensation because, so he firmly
believed, "the Divine Government--if we may use such a phrase to
express the sum of the 'customs of matter'--is wholly just....But for
this to be clear we must bear in mind what almost all forget, that
the rewards of life are contingent upon obedience to the _whole_
law--physical as well as moral--and that moral obedience will not
atone for physical sin, or _vice versâ_." Thus he could declare "the
more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of my
own), the more obvious it is that the wicked does _not_ flourish, nor
is the righteous punished." "The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as
certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so--for experimental
proof of the fact is within reach of us all--nay, is before us all in
our own lives, if we had but the eyes to see it." Nevertheless--
It is to be recollected, in view of the apparent discrepancy
between men's acts and their rewards, that Nature is juster
than we are. She takes into account what a man brings with him
into this world, which human justice cannot do. If I, born a
bloodthirsty and savage brute, inheriting these qualities from
others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang me; but
I shall not be visited with the horrible remorse which would
be my real punishment if, my nature being higher, I had done
the same thing.
Accordingly--
Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I
believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of
this life leads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that
their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.
If the expectation of hell hereafter can keep me from
evil-doing, surely a fortiori the certainty of hell now will
do so? If a man could be firmly impressed with the belief that
stealing damaged him as much as swallowing arsenic would do
(and it does), would not the dissuasive force of that belief
be greater than that of any based on mere future expectations?
And this leads me to quote words written by an old friend and
colleague of his, Sir Spencer Walpole:--
Of all the men I have ever known, his ideas and his standard
were, on the whole, the highest. He recognized that the fact
of his religious views imposed on him the duty of living the
most upright of lives; and I am very much of the opinion of a
little child, now grown into an accomplished woman, who,
when she was told that Professor Huxley had no hope of future
rewards and no fear of future punishments, emphatically
declared: "Then I think Professor Huxley is the best man I
have ever known."
XIII
MORALITY AND THE CHURCH
It is alike interesting and satisfactory to reflect that practical
morality in civilized life is much the same for all earnest men,
however they differ in their theories as to the origin of moral ideas
and the kind of motives and sanctions to be insisted on for right
action. It is true that the theologians and supernaturalists have
erected their scaffolding around the building of social and human
morality, vowing that it will not stand without. Yet it remains steady
when the scaffolding is warped by the winds of doctrine or uprooted
by advancing knowledge. The spirit that has built it is free from the
perverted enthusiasms which crusade against freedom, put thought in
fetters, and sanctify persecution. It lends no support to the other
spirit that would dominate minds and consciences by formulæ that lie
outside the court of reason. These things are of clericalism, and it
was clericalism to which Huxley ever found himself in opposition, for
it "raises obstacles to scientific ways of thinking, which are even
more important than scientific discoveries." But all associations for
promoting that sympathy which is at the foundation of human society
need not be infected with clericalism. If such a step were otherwise
expedient, even the State might do something towards that end
indirectly:--
I can conceive the existence of an Established Church which
should be a blessing to the community. A Church in which, week
by week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of
abstract propositions in theology, but to the setting before
men's minds of an ideal of true, just, and pure living; a
place in which those who are weary of the burden of daily
cares should find a moment's rest in the contemplation of the
higher life which is possible for all, though attained by so
few; a place in which the man of strife and of business should
have time to think how small, after all, are the rewards he
covets compared with peace and charity. Depend upon it, if
such a Church existed, no one would seek to disestablish it.
But, while sympathy is the basis of society and enthusiasm the
greatest motive power of humanity, there remains something more to
be considered. The man who could appreciate the value of the personal
consolations brought by the Bible-woman to the poor and down-trodden,
and the infinitely comfortable assurance of the mystic, firm as
hypnotic conviction, that he is the direct associate and instrument of
the Almighty, whether submissive or arrogant, from Stephen to the Bâb,
from Cromwell and Gordon to Bismarck and his Imperial associates,
such a man might well say: "I wish I could be so magnificently
self-confident, so untroubled by doubt. But I can't, for I have to
ask: Is it true?; and I find that these persons base themselves upon
very questionable grounds."
True, that in regard to the place of good and evil in this world the
best theological teachers--
substantially recognize these realities of things, however
strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The
doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate
depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the
race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential
vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to
a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself,
faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth
than the "liberal" popular illusions that babies are all born
good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible
for their failure to remain so; that it is given to everybody
to reach the ethical ideal if he will only try; that all
partial evil is universal good, and other optimistic figments,
such as that which represents "Providence" under the guise of
a paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that everything
will come right (according to our notions) at last.
...I am a very strong believer in the punishment of certain
kinds of actions, not only in the present, but in all the
future a man can have, be it long or short. Therefore in hell,
for I suppose that all men with a clear sense of right
and wrong (and I am not sure that any others deserve such
punishment) have now and then "descended into hell" and
stopped there quite long enough to know what infinite
punishment means. And if a genuine, not merely subjective,
immortality awaits us, I conceive that, without some
such change as that depicted in the fifteenth chapter of
_Corinthians_, immortality must be eternal misery. The fate of
Swift's Struldbrugs seems to me not more horrible than that of
a mind imprisoned for ever within the _flammantia moenia_ of
inextinguishable memories.
Such were the shapes into which the Christian theologians had
fashioned a number of moral truths when they annexed the house of
human morality. But what is the basis of certitude on which these
interpretations rest? If Adam was not an historical character, if the
story of the Fall be whittled down into a "type" which is typical of
no underlying reality, the basis of Pauline theology is shaken, and
practical deductions drawn from it are shaken also. In fact, "the
Demonology of Christianity shows that its founders knew no more
about the spiritual world than anybody else, and Newman's doctrine
of 'Development' is true to an extent of which the Cardinal did
not dream." And as to the argument that the successful spread of
Christianity attests the truth of the New Testament story, he replied
to his questioner with the general propositions:--
1. The Church founded by Jesus has _not_ made its way; has
_not_ permeated the world; but _did_ become extinct in the
country of its birth--as Nazarenism and Ebionism.
2. The Church that did make its way and coalesced with the
State in the fourth century had no more to do with the Church
founded by Jesus than Ultramontanism has with Quakerism. It is
Alexandrian Judaism and Neoplatonistic mystagogy, and as much
of the old idolatry and demonology as could be got in under
new or old names.
3. Paul has said that the Law was schoolmaster to Christ with
more truth than he knew. Throughout the Empire the synagogues
had their cloud of Gentile hangers-on--those who "feared God"
and who were fully prepared to accept a Christianity which was
merely an expurgated Judaism and the belief in Jesus as the
Messiah.
4. The Christian "Sodalitia" were not merely religious bodies,
but friendly societies, burial societies, and guilds. They
hung together for all purposes; the mob hated them as it
now hates the Jews in Eastern Europe, because they were more
frugal, more industrious, and led better lives than their
neighbours, while they stuck together like Scotchmen.
If these things are true--and I appeal to your knowledge of
history that they are so--what has the success of Christianity
to do with the truth or falsehood of the story of Jesus?
Furthermore, behind all the theological developments of the Church
lies the whole question of Theism, and "the philosophical difficulties
of Theism now are neither greater nor less than they have been ever
since Theism was invented."
XIV
LIFE AND FRIENDSHIPS
"To live laborious days" was, for Huxley, at all times a necessity as
well as a creed. The lover of knowledge and truth, he firmly believed,
must devote his uttermost powers to their service; he held as strongly
that every man's first duty to society was to support himself. But
science provided more fame than pence, and with wife and family to
support he was spurred to redoubled efforts. In the early years of
married life especially, while he was still struggling to make
his way, he often felt the pinch. He added to his modest income by
reviewing and translating scientific books and by lecturing. On
one occasion, when he was a candidate for a certain scientific
lectureship, one of the committee of election, a wealthy man,
expressed astonishment at his application--"what can he want with a
hundred a year?" "I dare say," commented Huxley, "he pays his cook
that." In early days, visioning the future, he and his wife had fondly
planned to marry on £400 a year, while he pursued science, unknown
if need be, for the sake of science. The reality pressed hardly upon
them; those were dark evenings when he would come home fagged out by
a second lecture at the end of a full day's work and lay himself down
wearily on one couch, while she, so long a semi-invalid, lay uselessly
on another. And, later, the upbringing of a large family, though its
advent made life the more worth living, involved a heavy strain. At
the same time, a man who was ever ready to take up responsibilities
for the furtherance of every branch of science with which he was
concerned had endless responsibilities committed to him. Besides
his researches in pure science, whether anatomy, paleontology, or
anthropology, his regular teaching work and other courses of lectures,
his long work as examiner at the London University, the production of
scientific memoirs and text-books and more general essays, he took
a leading share in editing the _Natural History Review_ for two and
a-half years; he was an active supporter of the chief scientific
societies to which he belonged, and took a prominent part in their
administration as member of council, secretary, or president, the
most laborious period of which was during the nine years of his
secretaryship of the Royal Society, soon to be followed by the
presidency. Add to these his service on the School Board and no less
than eight Royal Commissions, and it is easy to see that the longest
working days he could contrive were always filled and over-filled.
When very tired he would occasionally dash off for a week or two's
walking with a friend in Wales, or some corner of France; two summer
holidays in Switzerland with John Tyndall resulted in a joint paper on
the "Structure of Glacier Ice"; later, the family holidays by the
sea regularly saw a good deal of time devoted to writing, while his
exercise consisted of long walks.
Unlike Darwin, who at last found nothing save science engrossing
enough to make him oblivious of his constant ill-health, Huxley
never lost his keen delight in literature and art. He was a rapid and
omnivorous reader, devouring everything from a fairy tale to a blue
book, and tearing the heart out of a book at express speed. With this
went a love of great and beautiful poetry and of prose expression that
is at once exact and artistically balanced. "I have a great love and
respect for my native tongue," he wrote, "and take great pains to use
it properly. Sometimes I write essays half-a-dozen times before I can
get them into the proper shape; and I believe I become more fastidious
as I grow older." Indeed, even after much re-writing, his corrections
in proof must have appalled his publishers. "Science and literature,"
he declared, "are not two things, but two sides of one thing." "Have
something to say, and say it," was the great Duke's theory of
style. "Say it in such language," added Huxley, "that you can stand
cross-examination on every word. Be clear, though you may be convicted
of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact
some time and get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and
study chiefly to use language which will give a loophole of escape
either way, there is no hope for you."
Herein lay the secret of his lucidity. Uniting the scientific habit
of mind with the literary art, he showed that truthfulness need not
be bald, and that power lies rather in accuracy than in luxuriance of
diction. As to the influence which such a style exerted on the habit
of mind of his readers, there is remarkable testimony in a letter from
Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the _Life of Huxley_, ii,
239. Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence
of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning
of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless
superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he
had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have
produced the same effect upon him.
Huxley's own criticism of the one and only poem be ever published
is also instructive. On his way back from the funeral of Tennyson in
Westminster Abbey, he spent the journey in shaping out some lines on
the dead poet, the germ of which had come into his mind in the Abbey.
These, with a number of other tributes to Tennyson by professed poets,
were printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ for November, 1892. He writes
in a private letter:--
If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the
others, I should say that as to style it is hammered, and as
to feeling, human.
They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly
poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think
there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience
would have boggled over.
As regards the arts other than literary, he had a keen eye for a
picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtman's
and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour. To
good music, also, he was always susceptible; as a young man he used to
sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. In music,
as in painting, he was untrained. Yet, as has been noted already, his
illustrations to MacGillivray's _Voyage of the Rattlesnake_ and his
holiday sketches suggest that he might have gone far had he been
trained as an artist.
When first married he used to set aside Saturday afternoons to take
his wife to the Ella concerts, fore-runners of the "Saturday Pops.,"
but it was not very long before the pressure of circumstance forbade
this pleasure. Later, he very occasionally managed to go to the
theatre; but his chief recreation, apart from change of work and the
rapid devouring of a good novel, was in meeting his friends, when
occasion offered, at the scientific societies or at dinner, or now
and then in country visits which had not yet received the name of
"week-ends."
When, in the middle seventies, his position was firmly established and
he was living in a roomy house, No. 4 Marlborough Place, St. John's
Wood, there were gatherings of friends on Sunday evenings. An informal
meal awaited the guests, who came either on a general invitation or
when specially bidden; others put in an appearance later. There would
be much talk, from grave to gay, in those plainly appointed rooms, or
on a fine summer evening, perhaps, in the garden with its little lawn
behind the house. Some music, too, was almost sure to be performed by
friends or by the daughters of the house, whose progress in the art of
singing was ever a matter of concern to Mr. Herbert Spencer, himself
a great lover of music. Letters and Art were well represented there
as well as Science, intermingled with the friends of the younger
generation. "Here," writes G.W. Smalley,
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, 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....
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.
If scientific subjects came up in conversation, the luminous style, so
familiar in his written work, reappeared in talk.
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 in the intermediate period, from about 1860 onwards, the unceasing
rush of occupation rendered it very difficult to keep in touch with
his friends. On his initiative a small dining club of scientific
friends and allies was established. Almost all these close friends
were members of the Royal Society, and were likely to attend its
meetings. Dinner, therefore, was to be taken at a convenient hotel
before the monthly meeting of the Society, and those who were
inevitably drifting apart under the stress of circumstances would
have a regular meeting ground. This was the famous _x_ Club, a name
singularly appropriate on the principle of _lucus a non lucendo_ to a
club of nine members who never proceeded to the election of a tenth.
Opinions as to the name and constitution of the little society
being no less numerous than the members--indeed more so--"we finally
accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the _x_
Club; and the proposal of some genius among us that we should have
no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by
acclamation."
Huxley first propounded the scheme to his most intimate friends,
Joseph Dalton Hooker, then Assistant Director of Kew, and John
Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution.
George Busk, the anatomist, afterwards President of the College of
Surgeons, was another whose friendship dated from soon after
the return of the _Rattlesnake_ to England. Herbert Spencer, the
philosopher, and Sir John Lubbock, banker and naturalist, were friends
of nearly as long standing. Edward Frankland, Professor of Chemistry
at the Royal Institution, and Thomas Archer Hirst, Professor of
Physics and Pure Mathematics at University College, London, afterwards
Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich,
entered the circle as special friends of Tyndall's. William
Spottiswoode, Queen's Printer and mathematician, was the ninth member,
elected by the rest at the first meeting.
Between them they could have managed to contribute most of the
articles to a scientific Encyclopædia: six were Presidents of the
British Association; three were Associates of the Institute of France;
and from among them the Royal Society chose a Secretary, a Foreign
Secretary, a Treasurer, and three successive Presidents. Meeting
though they did for the sake of friendship and good fellowship, it
was inevitable that they should discuss the burning questions of the
scientific world freely from varied points of view, and, being all
animated by similar ideas of the high function of science and of the
great Society, the chief representative of science to which all but
one of them belonged, they incidentally exercised a strong influence
on the progress of scientific organization.
The first meeting took place on November 3, 1864; nearly nineteen
years passed before the circle was broken by the death of
Spottiswoode. Proposals were made to fill the gap with a new friend,
but, as the _raison d'être_ of the club had been simply the personal
attachment of the original nine, the project fell through. Finally,
after Hirst's death in 1892, when five out of the remaining six were
living away from London and for the most part in uncertain health,
it became more and more difficult to arrange a meeting, and the club
quietly lapsed after nearly twenty-eight years of existence.
Guests were often entertained at the _x_ dinners, men of science or
letters of almost every nationality--a delightful and quite informal
mode of personal intercourse. In the summer, also, the _x_ often made
a week-end expedition into the country or up the river, in which the
wives of the married members took part, the formula for the invitation
being _x's + yv's_.
XV
CHARLES DARWIN
To this focus of close friendships Charles Darwin would assuredly have
been invited to belong had he been other than an invalid living
away from London; for he was the warm and revered friend not only of
Huxley, but still more of Hooker, who in age stood midway between the
two--eight years younger than the one and eight years older than the
other--and who, for some fifteen years before the publication of the
_Origin of Species_, had been Darwin's most intimate friend and aid in
his work.
Huxley had made Darwin's acquaintance early in the fifties, and soon
fell under the spell of his deep thought, his utter sincerity and
generous warmth of heart. Darwin, for his part, was strongly attracted
by his new friend's penetrating knowledge, incisive criticism, and
brilliant conversation. When, in 1858, he began to write out the
_Origin_, Huxley was one of the three men he fixed upon by whose
judgment of the book he meant to abide. Lyell, who had read the book
before it came out, was the first; Hooker, his long-time aid and
critic and finally convert, the second. On the eve of publication,
secure of these, he adds: "If I can convert Huxley I shall be
content."
On all three the effect of the completed book, with its array of
detailed argument and evidence, was far greater than that of
previous discussions. With one or two reservations as to the logical
completeness of the theory, Huxley accepted it as a well-founded
working hypothesis, calculated to explain problems otherwise
inexplicable. There were evolutionists before Darwin, from Lamarck and
the author of the _Vestiges of Creation_ to Herbert Spencer; but as
there was no evidence to bear out the orthodox creational view of the
Book of _Genesis_, enlarged upon in detail by Milton, so before Darwin
the evidence in favour of the transmutation of species was wholly
insufficient, and no suggestion which had been made to the causes
of the assumed transmutation was in any way adequate to explain
the phenomena. Under such conditions only an agnostic attitude was
possible. "So," writes Huxley--
I took refuge in that "_thätige Skepsis_," which Goethe has so
well defined, and, reversing the apostolic precept to be all
things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of
the received doctrines when I had to do with the
transmutationists, and stood up for the possibility of
transmutation among the orthodox, thereby, no doubt,
increasing an already current, but quite undeserved,
reputation for needless combativeness.
Then came the publication of the Darwin-Wallace paper in 1858, and of
the _Origin_ in 1859, the effect of which he compares to--
the flash of light which, to a man who has lost himself on a
dark night, suddenly reveals a road which, whether it takes
him straight home or not, certainly goes his way. That which
we were looking for, and could not find, was an hypothesis
respecting the origin of known organic forms which assumed
the operation of no causes but such as could be proved to be
actually at work. We wanted, not to pin our faith to that or
any other speculation, but to get hold of clear and definite
conceptions which could be brought face to face with facts and
have their validity tested. The _Origin_ provided us with the
working hypothesis we sought. Moreover, it did the immense
service of freeing us for ever from the dilemma--refuse to
accept the creation hypothesis and what have you to propose
that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had
no answer ready, and I do not think that any one else had.
A year later we reproached ourselves with dullness for being
perplexed with such an inquiry. My reflection, when I first
made myself master of the central idea of the _Origin_, was:
"How extremely stupid not to have thought of that." I suppose
that Columbus's companions said much the same when he made the
egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle
for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious
enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the
heart of the species problem lay through them until Darwin
and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of the
_Origin_ guided the benighted.
Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of Evolution,
as applied to the organic world, took in Darwin's hands would
prove to be final or not, was to me a matter of indifference.
In my earliest criticisms of the _Origin_ I ventured to
point out that its logical foundation was insecure so long as
experiments in selective breeding had not produced varieties
which were more or less infertile; and that insecurity remains
up to the present time. But, with any and every critical doubt
which my sceptical ingenuity could suggest, the Darwinian
hypothesis remained incomparably more probable than the
creation hypothesis. And if we had none of us been able to
discern the paramount significance of some of the most patent
and notorious of natural facts, until they were, so to
speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the
dilemma--creation or nothing? It was obvious that hereafter
the probability would be immensely greater, that the links
of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than
that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all
the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those
who had no other object than the attainment of truth was to
accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis and see what could
be made of it. Either it would prove its capacity to elucidate
the facts of organic life or it would break down under the
strain. This was surely the dictate of common sense, and for
once common sense carried the day.
Mention has been made of the instant support he was able to lend the
_Origin_ in the _Times_ review of the book, and the extension of its
doctrines in regard to man. Even before the book appeared, however, he
began to act as what Darwin laughingly called his "general agent."
His address on "Persistent Types" (June, 1859) aimed at clearing up in
advance one of the obvious objections raised against acceptance of the
doctrine of Evolution--namely, how is it that, if evolution is ever
progressive, progress is not universal? How is it that all forms do
not necessarily advance, and that simple organisms still exist? As
it happened, Darwin did not discuss this point when he first put
the _Origin_ together, and speedily came to regard this as the most
serious omission in the book.
Great, then, was the debt of all science to Darwin. And not of science
only. The fight for freedom of thought and speech in science, into
which Huxley especially threw himself, was the more successful because
the immediate cause he upheld was so overwhelmingly strong in reason
and demonstration; and, the supreme curb upon thought being once
broken, a wider freedom was gained.
For Darwin, therefore, Huxley had the reverence due to one who had
forged a new and mighty weapon in the war for plain truth. But,
while he could not but uphold a theory so much in accord with his own
knowledge and so fruitful in its promise of new knowledge, whether the
author of it were his friend or not, admiration and affection for a
man of such utter sincerity, such selfless respect for truth, and warm
personality, led him, when those views were stupidly or maliciously
attacked, to take more trouble in his defence and support, and to
strike out much harder at his adversary than he would otherwise have
done. Darwin's friends were well assured that the scanty time which
his health allowed for work was far too precious to be wasted in
controversy; for his own sake and for the sake of the calm atmosphere
in which a great theory should be worked out, they thought that the
battling on a lower plane should be left to them. "You ought to be
like one of the blessed gods of Elysium, and let the inferior deities
do battle with the infernal powers." "If I say a savage thing," Huxley
told him, "it is only 'pretty Fanny's way'; but if you do, it is not
likely to be forgotten." Hence a dash of personal pleasure was infused
into the duty of upholding and defending the bringer of new light.
The acquaintance had begun about 1851; there was a common bond in
their sea experiences and explorations, as well as in their search
after a wider philosophy, to include the teachings of natural science;
the older man found in the younger a source of much biological and
other information, a suggestive critic and a stimulating companion.
Their relations took a long step towards intimacy after 1861, when,
after the loss of her eldest child, Mrs. Huxley and her other children
made a long stay at Down, and entered upon a life-long friendship with
Mrs. Darwin and the family. Thereafter followed many visits to Down,
and, whenever Darwin was in London, the certainty of half-an-hour's
keen talk--all that the doctor allowed--with his friend and
fellow-worker on some critical question of the moment.
Darwin's admiration of his friend's powers was outspoken. To quote one
or two expressions of it: Huxley had delivered, in 1862, six lectures
to working men, which were printed off each week as delivered in
"little green pamphlets," under the general title of "On Our Knowledge
of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature," winding up with
an account of the bearing of the _Origin_ upon the complete theory of
these causes. Acknowledging Nos. IV and V, Darwin writes:--
They are simply perfect. They ought to be largely advertised;
but it is very good in me to say so, for I threw down No.
IV with this reflection: "What is the good of me writing a
thundering big book when everything is in this green little
book, so despicable for its size?" In the name of all that is
good and bad, I may as well shut up shop altogether.
After reading the article "Mr. Darwin's Critics" in 1871, he wrote yet
more enthusiastically. Mr. Mivart, in an apologia for the attitude of
Roman Catholicism towards Evolution, twitted the generality of men of
science with their ignorance of the real doctrines of his Church, and
cited the Jesuit theologian, Suarez, the latest great representative
of scholasticism, as following St. Augustine in asserting derivative
creation--that is, evolution from primordial matter endowed with
certain powers. Huxley thereupon examined the works of the learned
Jesuit, and found not only that the particular reference was not
to the point, but that, in his tract on the "Six Days of Creation,"
Suarez expressly rejects the doctrine and reprehends Augustine
for holding it. "So," write Huxley gleefully at the irony of the
situation, "I have come out in the new character of a defender of
Catholic orthodoxy, and upset Mivart out of the mouth of his own
prophet."
In the course of a most appreciative letter Darwin exclaimed:--
What a wonderful man you are to grapple with those old
metaphysico-divinity books.... The pendulum is now swinging
against our side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the
other way; and no mortal man will do half as much as you in
giving it a start in the right direction, as you did at the
commencement.
And then, after "mounting climax on climax," he adds:
"I must tell you what Hooker said to me a few years ago. 'When
I read Huxley I feel quite infantile in intellect.'"
The most touching act of friendship, and one which assuredly gave
personal point to Huxley's remark in another connection, "Darwin is
in all things noble and generous--one of those people who think it
a privilege to let him help," took place when Huxley's health had
utterly broken down in 1873, and he was as depressed in mind as
in body. Who could say No to these words from the oldest and most
venerated among his devoted friends?--
Down, Beckenham, Kent.
April 23, 1873.
My dear Huxley,
I have been asked by some of your friends (eighteen in
number,) to inform you that they have placed through Robarts,
Lubbock, and Company the sum of £2,100 to your account at your
bankers. We have done this to enable you to get such complete
rest as you may require for the re-establishment of your
health; and in doing this we are convinced that we act for
the public interest, as well as in accordance with our most
earnest desires. Let me assure you that we are all your warm
personal friends, and that there is not a stranger or mere
acquaintance among us. If you could have heard what was
said, or could have read what was, as I believe, our inmost
thoughts, you would know that we all feel towards you as we
should to an honoured and much-loved brother. I am sure that
you will return this feeling, and will therefore be glad to
give us the opportunity of aiding you in some degree, as this
will be a happiness to us to the last day of our lives. Let
me add that our plan occurred to several of your friends at
nearly the same time, and quite independently of one another.
My dear Huxley, your affectionate friend,
CHARLES DARWIN.
Huxley was deeply moved. "What have I done to deserve this?" he
exclaimed. Before this generosity he at last allowed himself to
confess that, in the long struggle against ill health, he had been
beaten; but, as he said, only enough to teach him humility.
The relief from anxieties, the ultimate restoration to health through
a clear holiday, were an unforgettable gift from this "band of
brothers," and the sufferer who had been healed rejoiced when not
long after an opportunity arose to share in a similar gift of help and
healing to another of the same good fellowship.
XVI
HOOKER, FORBES, TYNDALL, AND SPENCER
Of his nearer contemporaries the two most intimate and faithful of
his life-long friendships were with Tyndall and Hooker, concerning the
utter frankness of which he writes to the latter:--
I wish you wouldn't be apologetic about criticism from
people who have a right to criticize. I always look upon any
criticism as a compliment, not but what the old Adam in T.H.H.
_will_ arise and fight vigorously against all impugnment and
irrespective of all odds in the way of authority, but that
is the way of the beast. Why I value your and Tyndall's and
Darwin's friendship so much is, among other things, that you
all pitch into me when necessary. You may depend upon it,
however blue I may look when in the wrong, it's wrath with
myself and nobody else.
The common note in these friendships was not only community of aims,
but an essential generosity and sincerity. This it was that had drawn
him so strongly to Edward Forbes among the leaders of biology when he
returned, an unknown but promising pioneer of science, from the voyage
of the _Rattlesnake_. For Forbes inspired his admiration and affection
as a man of letters and an artist who had not merged the _man_ in
the man of science; free from pedantry or jealousy--the two besetting
faults of literary and scientific men; earnest, disinterested, ready
to give his time and influence to help any man who was working for the
cause; one of the few to whom a proud man could feel obliged without
losing a particle of independence or self-respect.
My notions [he writes] are diametrically opposed to his in
some matters, and he helps me to oppose him.... I had a long
paper read at the Royal Society which opposed some of his
views, and he got up and spoke in the highest terms of it
afterwards. This is all as it should be. I can reverence such
a man and yet respect myself.
Without his aid and sympathy the young man would never have persevered
in the course he ventured to choose, and in following which it was one
of his greatest hopes that they should work in harmony for long years
at the aims so dear to both.
"One could trust him so thoroughly!" There lay the root of friendship.
And the trust was thoroughly reciprocated. The entire frankness
between friends is brightly illustrated by the history of the award
of the Royal Medal in 1854. As a member of the Royal Society Council,
Huxley had to vote on the names proposed for the various medals.
For the Royal Medal first Hooker was named, and received his hearty
support; then Forbes was put up, in his eyes equally deserving, and
almost more closely bound to him by ties of active friendship, so
that, whichever way he ultimately voted, his action might possibly be
ascribed to personal, not scientific, motives. Thereupon he explained
to the Council that he considered their claims equal; that, whichever
chanced to have been put forward first, he would never have proposed
the other in opposition to him. As he had spoken of Hooker's
merits, so also he spoke of Forbes's, positively, and not by way of
comparison; and this done, voted for both!
Hooker was actually elected. Huxley then wrote to both his friends,
explaining fully what he had done. Had he felt that one of the two had
strongly superior claims, and thought it right to vote for him only,
the other, he was sure, would have fully appreciated his motives, and
it would have done no injury to their friendship.
He was not mistaken. Among his most precious possessions he kept
Forbes's reply:--
I heartily concur in the course you have taken, and, had I
been placed as you have been, would have done exactly
the same.... Your way of proceeding was as true an act of
friendship as any that could be performed. As to myself, I
dream so little about medals that the notion of being on the
list never entered my brain, even when asleep. If it ever
comes, I shall be pleased and thankful; if it does not, it is
not the sort of thing to break my equanimity. Indeed, I would
always like to see it given not as a mere honour, but as a
help to a good man, and this it is assuredly in Hooker's case.
Government people are so ignorant that they require to have
people's merits drummed into their heads by all possible
means, and Hooker's getting the medal may be of real service
to him before long. I am in a snug, though not an idle, nest;
he has not got his resting-place yet. And so, my dear Huxley,
I trust that you know me too well to think that I am either
grieved or envious; and you, Hooker, and I are much of the
same way of thinking.
Frankness was the only remedy for such an imbroglio, and, as Huxley
wrote to Hooker about a similar case a couple of years later:--
It's deuced hard to keep straight in this wicked world, but,
as you say, the only chance is to out with it, and I thank you
much for writing so frankly about the matter.
[Illustration: From a Photograph by Downey, 1890 To face p. 102]
With Hooker, the keen observer and critical reasoner, the man of warm
impulses and sane judgments, he had a peculiarly intimate bond of
friendship summed up in a letter of 1888, when they had received the
Copley medal in successive years:--
It is very pleasant to have our niches in the Pantheon close
together. It is getting on for forty years since we were first
"acquent," and, considering with what a very considerable dose
of tenacity, vivacity, and that glorious firmness (which the
beasts who don't like us call obstinacy) we are both endowed,
the fact that we have never had the shadow of a shade of a
quarrel is more to our credit than being ex-Presidents and
Copley medallists. But we have had a masonic bond in both
being well salted in early life. I have always felt that I
owed a great deal to my acquaintance with the realities of
things gained in the old _Rattlesnake_.
From earliest days, soon after they had returned, the one from the
South Seas, the other from the Himalayas, they had stood shoulder
to shoulder confidently in the struggle to put science on a firm
and independent footing. When the future of the Natural History
Collections at the British Museum was in the balance, they
energetically resolved to constitute themselves into a permanent
"Committee of Safety," to watch over what was being done and take
measures with the advice of others when necessary. Together as
biologists they realized the greatness of Darwin's vision; together
they bore the brunt of the battle of the _Origin_ at Oxford. In
seeking a good mouthpiece for scientific opinion, in reorganizing
and administering the great scientific societies, in their work for
scientific education, they shared the same ideas, and their friendship
and Tyndall's formed the starting-point of the _x_ Club, with its
regular meetings of old friends. More than once they went off on a
short holiday tour together, and when Huxley was invalided in 1873 it
was Hooker who took charge and carried him off for a month's active
trip in the geological paradise of the Auvergne. The care and company
of so good a friend made the crowning ingredient in a most successful
prescription. And when both had retired from official life a new
interest in common sprang up through Huxley's incursion into botany.
While recruiting his health in the high Alps, his interest was aroused
by the Gentians, and he wrote a valuable paper on their morphology
and distribution. This interest continued itself into the making of
a rock-garden in his Eastbourne home, where, in his spare hours,
he proceeded to put into happy practice Candide's famous maxim,
"_Cultivons notre jardin_," and drew from this occupation the simile
of the wild chalk down and the cultivated garden in his Romanes
Lecture to illustrate the contrast between the cosmic process and the
social organism.
Hooker often sent his friend plants from his own garden, sometimes
banteringly including one which would "flourish in any neglected
corner."
An unclouded intimacy of friendship lasted to the end, and it was
Hooker who received the last letter written by his friend.
Close as a brother, too, and claiming the name of brother in
affectionate adoption, was John Tyndall, radiant in genial warmth
and high spirits. They, too, were at one in thoughts, sympathies, and
aims; they travelled together, especially in the Alps, where Tyndall
mainly carried out the investigation of certain problems in relation
to the glaciers which Huxley had suggested to him, and, being "a
masterful man and over-generous," insisted that the resulting paper on
glaciers should bear both their names.
Tyndall came to the School of Mines as Professor of Physics in 1859 at
his friend's instigation, and for nine years they were, as colleagues,
in daily contact, and indeed were not far separated when Tyndall
succeeded Faraday at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.
Tyndall, who remained a bachelor till late in middle life, always
found a warm corner beside his friend's hearth. From the earliest days
of the household in the little house at Waverley Place he was admitted
to the inner circle of a lively friendship by Mrs. Huxley also, that
keen judge of character, and to the children ranked as a kind of
unofficial uncle. On New Year's Day he was chief among the two or
three intimates who were bidden here, having no domestic hearth of
their own, Herbert Spencer and Hirst being the other "regulars," and
later Michael Foster.
As the two men both had ready pens and stood side by side in many
controversies, they came to be regarded by the public as a pair of
Great Twin Brethren, the Castor and Pollux of many a scientific battle
of Lake Regillus. Odd confusions sometimes followed. In 1876, not
long after Tyndall's marriage to the daughter of Lord Claud Hamilton,
Huxley was described in a newspaper paragraph as setting out for
America "with his titled bride," and even, on Tyndall's death,
received the doubtful honour of a funeral sermon.
True that they did not see eye to eye on some of the most fundamental
matters of social and political principle, and where they did
Tyndall's vehement enthusiasm would sometimes sweep him into
activities where his friend could not follow. But these things were
no bar to their mutual affection and esteem, and in token of this two
letters of 1866 may be quoted, when England was sharply divided on the
question of Governor Eyre's action in suppressing an incipient revolt
in Jamaica.
In particular, a negro preacher named Gordon had been arrested,
court-martialled, and summarily executed. A Royal Commission appointed
to inquire into the case declared that the evidence given appeared to
be wholly insufficient to establish the charge upon which the prisoner
took his trial, and that in the evidence adduced they could not see
any sufficient proof of Gordon's complicity in the outbreak, or of
having been a party to any general conspiracy against the Government.
To many thoughtful and law-abiding persons such a proceeding
appeared to be no better than judicial murder, constituting a hideous
precedent; a committee was formed to present a formal indictment
against Governor Eyre and obtain a judicial pronouncement on the
question, quite apart from the two other questions persistently
confused with it--namely, was Gordon a Jamaica Hampden or was he a
psalm-singing firebrand, and was Governor Eyre actuated by the highest
and noblest motives, or was he under the influence of panic-stricken
rashness or worse impulses?
With this high constitutional end in view--the protection of
individual liberty--Huxley joined the committee. To Charles Kingsley,
who confessed to taking the hero-worshipper's view of Governor Eyre,
Huxley replied:--
I dare say he did all this with the best of motives and in a
heroic vein. But if English law will not declare that heroes
have no more right to kill people in this fashion than other
folk, I shall take an early opportunity of migrating to Texas
or some other quiet place where there is less hero-worship
and more respect for justice, which is to my mind of much more
importance than hero-worship.
In point of fact, men take sides on this question, not so much
by looking at the mere facts of the case, but rather as their
deepest political convictions lead them. And the great use of
the prosecution, and one of my reasons for joining it, is
that it will help a great many people to find out what their
profoundest political beliefs are.
The hero-worshippers who believe that the world is to be
governed by its great men, who are to lead the little ones,
justly if they can, but, if not, unjustly drive or kick them
the right way, will sympathize with Mr. Eyre.
The other sect (to which I belong), who look upon hero-worship
as no better than any other idolatry and upon the attitude of
mind of the hero-worshipper as essentially immoral; who think
it is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right
in chains; who look upon the observance of inflexible justice
as between man and man as of far greater importance than even
the preservation of social order, will believe that Mr. Eyre
has committed one of the greatest crimes of which a person in
authority can be guilty, and will strain every nerve to obtain
a declaration that their belief is in accordance with the law
of England.
People who differ on fundamentals are not likely to convert
one another. To you, as to my dear friend Tyndall, with whom
I almost always act, but who in this matter is as much opposed
to me as you are, I can only say, let us be strong enough and
wise enough to fight the question out as a matter of principle
and without bitterness.
To Tyndall, whose convictions were bred in Ulster and fostered by an
ardent devotion to Carlyle, he wrote in the same strain, apropos of a
friend's banter on their sudden division:--
I replied to the jest earnestly enough--that I hoped and
believed our old friendship was strong enough to stand any
strain that might be put on it, much as I grieved that we
should be ranged in opposite camps in this or any other case.
That you and I have fundamentally different political
principles must, I think, have become obvious to both of us
during the progress of the American War. The fact is made
still more plain by your printed letter, the tone and spirit
of which I greatly admire, without being able to recognize in
it any important fact or argument which had not passed through
my mind before I joined the Jamaica Committee.
Thus there is nothing for it but for us to agree to differ,
each supporting his own side to the best of his ability and
respecting his friend's freedom as he would his own, and doing
his best to remove all petty bitterness from that which is
at bottom one of the most important constitutional battles in
which Englishmen have for many years been engaged.
If you and I are strong enough and wise enough, we shall be
able to do this, and yet preserve that love for one another
which I value as one of the good things of my life.
That public controversy could be conducted without loss of friendship
he showed also in debate with Herbert Spencer. Their private
encounters in argument were often very lively, for Spencer was a most
tenacious disputant, to whom argument was as the breath of life.
It was probably after a meeting of the _x_ Club, in the freedom of
which debate was likely to be of the liveliest, that Spencer wrote
accusing himself of losing his temper, and received the following
reply:--
Your conscience has been treating you with the most extreme
and unjust severity.
I recollect you _looked_ rather savage at one point in our
discussion, but I do assure you that you committed no overt
act of ferocity; and if you had, I think I should have fully
deserved it for joining in the ferocious onslaught we all made
upon you.
What your sins may be in this line to other folk I don't know,
but, so far as I am concerned, I assure you I have often said
that I know no one who takes aggravated opposition better than
yourself, and that I have not a few times been ashamed of the
extent to which I have tried your patience.
So you see that you have what the Buddhists call a stock of
accumulated merit, _envers moi_; and if you should ever feel
inclined to "d---- my eyes," you can do so and have a balance
left.
Seriously, my old friend, you must not think it necessary to
apologize to me about any such matters, but believe me (d--ned
or und--d),--Ever yours faithfully....
If he was comrade and brother among the friends of his own generation,
he was a living inspiration to the friends of the next generation,
especially to the pupils and teaching lieutenants who worked in
close touch with him. His younger disciples always felt that in acute
criticism and vast learning nobody surpassed him; but what they yet
more admired than his learning was his wisdom. It was a delight to
read an essay fresh from his pen, but an ever so much higher delight
to hear him talk for five minutes. "His," says Professor Hubrecht,
"was the most beautiful and the most manly intellect I ever knew
of." The personal affection as well as admiration he inspired may be
gathered from Sir E. Ray Lankester's words: "There has been no man or
woman whom I have met in 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." And Professor Jeffery Parker concludes his
Recollections of his old chief 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."
Indeed, his relations with his demonstrators were typical of his
judgment of men, his distinction between the essential and the
unessential, which made him a successful administrator.
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."
The first passport to his friendship was entire sincerity. Whatever
other claims might be advanced, he would shut out from any approach to
intimacy those whom he found to be untruthful or not straightforward.
Naturally he did not offer any unnecessary encouragement to bores and
dullards, but in his intercourse with these undesirables and wasters
of his time he adopted none of the "offensive-defensive" methods
of, say, Dr. Johnson or Lord Westbury. He armed himself with a cold
correctitude of politeness, and lowered the social temperature instead
of raising it.
XVII
IN THE FAMILY CIRCLE
His acquaintance and friendship were eagerly sought, and to those who
entered the circle he gave abundantly of his brilliant gifts and of
friendly affection; but the inmost circle was small--the men who were
comrades and brothers; the sister and the brother united with him in
love and trust; the wife to win whom he served so long, and without
whose sustaining help and comradeship his quick spirit and nervous
temperament could hardly have endured the long and often embittered
struggle.
In this inmost circle he was at once strong and tender. The friend who
most cordially admired his intellectual vigour and unflinching honesty
could write after his death that--
what now dwells most in my mind is the memory of old kindness,
and of the days when I used to see him with (his wife) 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.
Always the home was the inmost centre of his own life. Here he found
personal solace in his long struggle; the sympathy that was the pillar
and stay of his genius, the twin incentive to labour and achievement,
the warmth that gave a fuller value to the light he ensued. None knew
more perfectly than himself what he owed to his life-long companion,
who, in turn, was as much uplifted by his eager spirit as she was
proud to be the cherisher of big aspirations and the active minister
to his attainment. To her critical ear he gave the first reading of
his essays; the judgment and the praise that he most valued were hers,
and, as he put it towards the end of his life, when he was travelling
with his son in Madeira and had been cut off from letters longer than
he liked:--
Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been
horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be
to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to
immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as
wise in that as in other things.
Quick and keen-edged as he was, I cannot recall his ever losing his
temper with any of us at home. Firm he was under his great tenderness
for children; those nearest him felt a certain awe before the
infallible force of his moral judgments; his arbitrament, though
rarely invoked, was instant and final. Going out into the world
afterwards, I think we did not fail to realize how different the
home atmosphere must be where self-control does not rule, and the
inevitable rubs of life find vent in irritable and ill-considered
words.
It was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence that 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 describe
himself, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes
spare half-an-hour just before or just after dinner to draw wonderful
pictures for the little ones, or on a Sunday he would now and then
walk with the elder ones to Hampstead Heath or to the Zoo, where, as
a constant visitant to the prosector's laboratory, he was a well-known
figure, and admitted by the keepers to their arcana. But, while he
often told us stories of the sea and of animals, he did not talk
"shop" to us, as many people seemed to expect by their inquiries
whether we did not receive quite a scientific education from his
companionship.
At the same time, he was anything but a Bohemian. His inborn gaiety
and high spirits, his humour and love of adventure, found from the
first a balance in his love of science; and the rough experience
of his early days intensified by contrast the spiritual serenity
of united love. Lack of order, whether in mind or in outward
surroundings, was no recommendation to him; and so far as the
conventions represented in brief some valid results of social
experience, he observed them and upheld them. They are not always dry
husks out of which reason has evaporated. But where such were merely
unreasoned custom, he was ready to set aside his mere likes and
dislikes on good cause shown, and to follow reason as against the
simple prejudice of custom, even his own.
On the whole, he made his impression on his children more by example
than by spoken precept; much of his attitude may be gathered from a
letter 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 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.
After he had retired from his professorial work and settled down at
Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the advantage of his leisure.
His natural love for children had scope for expression, and children
themselves had an instinctive confidence in the power and sympathy
that irradiated his face and gave his square, rugged features the
beauty of wisdom and kindliness. He could captivate them alike by
lively fun and excellent nonsense, and by lucid explanations of the
wonders of the world about which children love to hear. He fired one
small granddaughter with a love of astronomy, and one day a visitor,
entering unexpectedly, was startled to find the pair of them kneeling
on the floor of the entrance hall before a large sheet of paper, on
which the professor was drawing a diagram of the solar system, with
a little pellet and a big ball to represent earth and sun, while the
child was listening with rapt 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.
One of the most charming unions of the playful and serious was his
letter to the small boy, still under five, who was reading _The Water
Babies_, wherein his grandfather's name is genially made fun of among
the authorities on Water Babies and Water Beasts of every description.
Moreover, there is a picture by Linley Sambourne, showing Huxley and
Owen examining a bottled Water Baby under big magnifying glasses.
Now, as the child greatly desired more light on the reality of Water
Babies, here was an authority to consult. And, as he had already
learned to write, he indited 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 letter" that must be read to
him. The hint bore fruit, and to his carefully pencilled epistle:
Have you seen a Water Baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it
wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day?
came a reply from his grandfather, neatly printed, letter by letter,
very unlike the orderly confusion with which his pen usually rushed
across the paper--to the great perplexity, often, of his foreign
correspondents and sometimes of correspondents nearer home:--
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.
There is a story of Mohammed that once, rather than disturb a
favourite cat, he cut off the sleeve of his robe on which it lay
asleep. Whether in like circumstances my father would have done the
same--had flowing sleeves been a Victorian fashion--I cannot certainly
say, though he once was found similarly dispossessed of his favourite
study chair; but he always regarded this anecdote as displaying
an agreeable trait in the Prophet. For he himself was very fond
of animals, and, though we seldom kept dogs in London, cats were
invariable members of the household. Apropos of these, a letter may
be quoted which was written in 1893 in reply to an inquiry from a
journalist who was collecting anecdotes for an article on the Home
Pets of Celebrities:--
A long series of cats has reigned over my household for the
last forty years, or thereabouts, but I am sorry to say that I
have no pictorial or other record of their physical and moral
excellences.
The present occupant of the throne is a large, young,
grey Tabby--Oliver by name. Not that he is in any sense a
protector, for I doubt whether he has the heart to kill a
mouse. However, I saw him catch and eat the first butterfly
of the season, and trust that this germ of courage, thus
manifested, may develop with age into efficient mousing.
As to sagacity, I should say that his judgment respecting the
warmest place and the softest cushion in a room is infallible;
his punctuality at meal-times is admirable; and his
pertinacity in jumping on people's shoulders, till they
give him some of the best of what is going, indicates great
firmness.
XVIII
SOME LETTERS AND TABLE TALK
My father's letters were seldom without a dash of playfulness or
humour somewhere; a thing always fresh and spontaneous, unlike the
calculated or laboured playfulness sometimes to be observed in the
epistolary touch of literary folk. A capital example is a note to
Matthew Arnold, at whose house he had left his umbrella. Arnold, it
may be added, had recently been critically engaged upon the works of
Bishop Wilson:--
Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness, and then
inspect your umbrella stand. You will there see a beautiful
brown smooth-handled umbrella which is _not_ your property.
Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and
bring it with you next time you come to the Club. The porter
will take care of it for me.
Sometimes the words will come trippingly from the pen as if they were
flung out in a brilliant flash of talk, like the following sketch of
human character:--
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.
As to his conversation, that, wrote the late Wilfrid Ward,
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."
Some fragments of his talk have been preserved by the same hand.
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 greatcoat. I was _quite overcome_ by this species of spiritual
investiture. 'Thank you, Archbishop,' I said; 'I feel as if I were
receiving the pallium.'"
On another occasion he drew a distinction between two writers, with
neither of whom he sympathized. "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_."
Of his quickness in rising to the occasion Professor Howes tells a
story. Staying after a lecture to answer questions, he turned to a
student and said: "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."
From among my own recollections I give the following:--"It is one of
the most saddening things 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." Of the attitude towards Spiritualism of a
certain member of the Society for Psychical Research:--"He doesn't
believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name. He is one of those
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."
Again:--"It is very strange how most men will do anything to evade
responsibility." Later, we were talking of the contrast between
Hellene and Hebrew. "The real chosen people," he said, "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 pro-consul.
"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."
Here may be quoted a passage from a letter to Professor George
Romanes:--
I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus--very
little for later "Christianity." But the only religion that
appeals to me is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from
the best Stoics and something from Spinoza and something from
Goethe, and there is a religion for men. Some of these days I
think I will make a cento out of the works of these people.
This cento, however, he never made. Had he done so, he would assuredly
have illustrated his saying to Charles Kingsley:--
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves
to fact; not to try and make facts harmonize with my
aspirations--
a notion expanded thus:--
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest
manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian
conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down
before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
pre-conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever
abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only
begun to learn content and peace of mind since I resolved at
all costs to do this.
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