Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 23

Monte Generoso, Switzerland, June 25, 1889.

My Lord Mayor,

I greatly regret my inability to be present at the meeting which is to be held, under your Lords.h.i.+p's auspices, in reference to M. Pasteur and his Inst.i.tute. The unremitting labours of that eminent Frenchman during the last half-century have yielded rich harvests of new truths, and are models of exact and refined research. As such they deserve, and have received, all the honours which those who are the best judges of their purely scientific merits are able to bestow. But it so happens that these subtle and patient searchings out of the ways of the infinitely little--of the swarming life where the creature that measures one-thousandth part of an inch is a giant--have also yielded results of supreme practical importance. The path of M. Pasteur's investigations is strewed with gifts of vast monetary value to the silk trades, the brewer, and the wine merchant. And this being so, it might well be a proper and graceful act on the part of the representatives of trade and commerce in its greatest centre to make some public recognition of M.

Pasteur's services, even if there were nothing further to be said about them. But there is much more to be said. M. Pasteur's direct and indirect contributions to our knowledge of the causes of diseased states, and of the means of preventing their recurrence, are not measurable by money values, but by those of healthy life and diminished suffering to men. Medicine, surgery, and hygiene have all been powerfully affected by M. Pasteur's work, which has culminated in his method of treating hydrophobia. I cannot conceive that any competently instructed person can consider M. Pasteur's labours in this direction without arriving at the conclusion that, if any man has earned the praise and honour of his fellows, he has. I find it no less difficult to imagine that our wealthy country should be other than ashamed to continue to allow its citizens to profit by the treatment freely given at the Inst.i.tute without contributing to its support. Opposition to the proposals which your Lords.h.i.+p sanctions would be equally inconceivable if it arose out of nothing but the facts of the case thus presented.

But the opposition which, as I see from the English papers, is threatened has really for the most part nothing to do either with M.

Pasteur's merits or with the efficacy of his method of treating hydrophobia. It proceeds partly from the fanatics of laissez faire, who think it better to rot and die than to be kept whole and lively by State interference, partly from the blind opponents of properly conducted physiological experimentation, who prefer that men should suffer than rabbits or dogs, and partly from those who for other but not less powerful motives hate everything which contributes to prove the value of strictly scientific methods of enquiry in all those questions which affect the welfare of society. I sincerely trust that the good sense of the meeting over which your Lords.h.i.+p will preside will preserve it from being influenced by those unworthy antagonisms, and that the just and benevolent enterprise you have undertaken may have a happy issue.

I am, my Lord Mayor, your obedient servant,

T.H. Huxley.

Hotel Kursaal, Maloja, Haute Engadine, July 8, 1889.

My dear Lankester,

Many thanks for your letter. I was rather anxious as to the result of the meeting, knowing the malice and subtlety of the Philistines, but as it turned out they were effectually snubbed. I was glad to see your allusion to Coleridge's impertinences. It will teach him to think twice before he abuses his position again. I do not understand Stead's position in the Pall Mall. He snarls but does not bite.

I am glad that the audience (I judge from the "Times" report) seemed to take the points of my letter, and live in hope that when I see last week's "Spectator" I shall find Hutton frantic.

This morning a letter marked "Immediate" reached me from Bourne, date July 3. I am afraid he does not read the papers or he would have known it was of no use to appeal to me in an emergency. I am writing to him.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[On his return to England, however, a fortnight of London, interrupted though it was by a brief visit to Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward at the delightful old house of Great Hampden, was as much as he could stand.

"I begin to discover," he writes to Sir M. Foster, "I have a heart again, a circ.u.mstance of which I had no reminder at the Maloja." So he retreated at once to Eastbourne, which had done him so much good before.]

4 Marlborough Place, September 24, 1889.

My dear Hooker,

How's a' wi' ye'? We came back from the Engadine early in the month, and are off to Eastbourne to-morrow. I rejuvenate in Switzerland and senescate (if there is no such verb, there ought to be) in London, and the sooner I am out of it the better.

When are you going to have an x? I cannot make out what has become of Spencer, except that he is somewhere in Scotland.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

We shall be at our old quarters--3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne--from to-morrow onwards.

[The next letter shows once more the value he set upon botanical evidence in the question of the influence of conditions in the process of evolution.]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, September 29, 1889.

My dear Hooker,

I hope to be with you at the Athenaeum on Thursday. It does one good to hear of your being in such good working order. My knowledge of orchids is infinitesimally small, but there were some eight or nine species plentiful in the Engadine, and I learned enough to appreciate the difficulties. Why do not some of these people who talk about the direct influence of conditions try to explain the structure of orchids on that tack? Orchids at any rate can't try to improve themselves in taking shots at insects' heads with pollen bags--as Lamarck's Giraffes tried to stretch their necks!

Balfour's ballon d'essai [I.e. touching a proposed Roman Catholic University for Ireland.] (I do not believe it could have been anything more) is the only big blunder he has made, and it pa.s.ses my comprehension why he should have made it. But he seems to have dropped it again like the proverbial hot potato. If he had not, he would have hopelessly destroyed the Unionist party.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[At the end of the year he thanks Lord Tennyson for his gift of "Demeter":--]

December 26, 1889.

My dear Tennyson,

Accept my best thanks for your very kind present of "Demeter." I have not had a Christmas Box I valued so much for many a long year. I envy your vigour, and am ashamed of myself beside you for being turned out to gra.s.s. I kick up my heels now and then, and have a gallop round the paddock, but it does not come to much.

With best wishes to you, and, if Lady Tennyson has not forgotten me altogether, to her also.

Believe me, yours very faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[A discussion in the "Times" this autumn, in which he joined, was of unexpected moment to him, inasmuch as it was the starting-point for no fewer than four essays in political philosophy, which appeared the following year in the "Nineteenth Century".

The correspondence referred to arose out of the heckling of Mr. John Morley by one of his const.i.tuents at Newcastle in November 1889. The heckler questioned him concerning private property in land, quoting some early dicta from the "Social Statics" of Mr. Herbert Spencer, which denied the justice of such owners.h.i.+p. Comments and explanations ensued in the "Times"; Mr. Spencer declared that he had since partly altered that view, showing that contract has in part superseded force as the ground of owners.h.i.+p; and that in any case it referred to the idea of absolute ethics, and not to relative or practical politics.

Huxley entered first into the correspondence to point out present and perilous applications of the absolute in contemporary politics.

Touching on a State guarantee of the t.i.tle to land, he asks if there is any moral right for confiscation:--In Ireland, he says, confiscation is justified by the appeal to wrongs inflicted a century ago; in England the theorems of "absolute political ethics" are in danger of being employed to make this generation of land-owners responsible for the misdeeds of William the Conqueror and his followers. ("Times" November 12.)

His remaining share in the discussion consisted of a brief pa.s.sage of arms with Mr. Spencer on the main question [November 18.], and a reply to another correspondent [November 21.], which brings forward an argument enlarged upon in one of the essays, namely that if the land belongs to all men equally, why should one nation claim one portion rather than another? For several owners.h.i.+p is just as much an infringement of the world's owners.h.i.+p as is personal owners.h.i.+p.

Moreover, history shows that land was originally held in several owners.h.i.+p, and that not of the nation, but of the village community.

These signs of renewed vigour induced Mr. Knowles to write him a "begging letter," proposing an article for the "Nineteenth Century"

either in commendation of Bishop Magee's recent utterances--it would be fine for eulogy to come from such a quarter after the recent encounter--or on the general subject of which his "Times" letters dealt with a part.

Huxley's choice was for the latter. Writing on November 21, he says:--]

Now as to the article. I have only hesitated because I want to get out a new volume of essays, and I am writing an introduction which gives me an immensity of trouble. I had made up my mind to get it done by Christmas, and if I write for you it won't be. However, if you don't mind leaving it open till the end of this month, I will see what can he done in the way of a screed about, say, "The Absolute in Practical Life." The Bishop would come in excellently; he deserves all praises, and my only hesitation about singing them is that the conjunction between the "Infidel" and the Churchman is just what the blatant platform Dissenters who had been at him would like. I don't want to serve the Bishop, for whom I have a great liking and respect, as the bear served his sleeping master, when he smashed his nose in driving an unfortunate fly away!

By the way, has the Bishop published his speech or sermon? I have only seen a newspaper report.

[Soon after this, he proposed to come to town and talk over the article with Mr. Knowles. The latter sent him a telegram--reply paid--asking him to fix a day. The answer named a day of the week and a day of the month which did not agree; whereupon Mr. Knowles wrote by the safer medium of the post for an explanation, thinking that the post-office clerks must have bungled the message, and received the following reply:--]

3 Jevington Gardens, Eastbourne, November 26, 1889.

My dear Knowles,

May jacka.s.ses sit upon the graves of all telegraph clerks! But the boys are worse, and I shall have to write to the Postmaster-General about the little wretch who brought your telegram the other day, when my mind was deeply absorbed in the concoction of an article for THE Review of our age.