Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 61

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

I shall never forget the first time I saw him enter his lecture-room.

He came in rapidly, yet without bustle, and as the clock struck, a brief glance at his audience and then at once to work. He had the excellent habit of beginning each lecture (save, of course, the first) with a recapitulation of the main points of the preceding one. The course was amply ill.u.s.trated by excellent coloured diagrams, which, I believe, he had made; but still more valuable were the chalk sketches he would draw on the blackboard with admirable facility, while he was talking, his rapid, dexterous strokes quickly building up an organism in our minds, simultaneously through ear and eye. The lecture over, he was ever ready to answer questions, and I often admired his patience in explaining points which there was no excuse for any one not having understood.

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

To one point I desire specially to bear witness. There were persons who dreaded sending young men to him, fearing lest their young friends'

religious beliefs should be upset by what they might hear said. For years I attended his lectures, but never once did I hear him make use of his position as a teacher to inculcate, or even hint at, his own theological views, or to depreciate or a.s.sail what might be supposed to be the religion of his hearers. No one could have behaved more loyally in that respect, and a proof that I thought so is that I subsequently sent my own son to be his pupil at South Kensington, where his experience confirmed what had previously been my own.

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

The picture is completed by Professor Howes in the "Students' Magazine"

of the Royal College of Science:--

As a cla.s.s lecturer Huxley was facile princeps, and only those who were privileged to sit under him can form a conception of his delivery.

Clear, deliberate, never hesitant nor unduly emphatic, never repet.i.tional, always logical, his every word told. Great, however, as were his cla.s.s lectures, his working-men's were greater. Huxley was a firm believer in the "distillatio per ascensum" of scientific knowledge and culture, and spared no pains in approaching the artisan and so-called "working cla.s.ses." 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 inst.i.tutes is regarded by some to have rendered their continuance unnecessary. He replied, almost with indignation], "With our central situation and resources, we ought to be in a position to give the workmen that which they cannot get elsewhere," [adding that he would deeply deplore any such discontinuance.

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

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

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

Though candid, Huxley was never unkind...

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

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

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

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

I used always to admire the simple and business-like way in which Huxley made his entry on great occasions. He hated anything like display, and would have none of it. At the Royal Inst.i.tution, 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-a.s.sertion. He walked in through the door on the left, as if he were entering his own laboratory. In these days he bore scarcely a mark of age. He was in the full vigour of manhood and looked the man he was.

Faultlessly dressed--the rule in the Royal Inst.i.tution is evening costume--with a firm step and easy bearing, he took his place apparently without a thought of the people who were cheering him. To him it was an anniversary. He looked, and he probably was, the master.

Surrounded as he was by the celebrities of science and the ornaments of London drawing-rooms, there was none who had quite the same kind of intellectual ascendancy which belonged to him. The square forehead, the square jaw, the tense lines of the mouth, the deep flas.h.i.+ng dark eyes, the impression of something more than strength he gave you, an impression of sincerity, of solid force, of immovability, yet with the gentleness arising from the serene consciousness of his strength--all this belonged to Huxley and to him alone. The first glance magnetised his audience. The eyes were those of one accustomed to command, of one having authority, and not fearing on occasion to use it. The hair swept carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew rather long behind, yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine in everything--look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art, he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in oratory or whatever else--he had simplicity. The force was in the thought and the diction, and he needed no other. The voice was rather deep, low, but quite audible, at times sonorous, and always full. He used the chest-notes. His manner here, in the presence of this select and rather limited audience--for the theatre of the Royal Inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science. I remember going late to that, and having to sit far back, yet hearing every word easily; and there too the feeling was the same, that he had mastered his audience, taken possession of them, and held them to the end in an unrelaxing grip, as a great actor at his best does. There was nothing of the actor about him, except that he knew how to stand still, but masterful he ever was.

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

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

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

I used to say of my own lectures that if n.o.body else learned anything from them, I did; because I always took a great deal of pains over them. But it is none the less satisfactory to find that there WERE other learners.

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

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

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

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

Spencer put it, from fairy tales to the last volume on metaphysics.

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

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

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

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

His recreations were, as a rule, literary, and consisted in a change of mental occupation. The only times I can remember his playing an outdoor game are in the late sixties, when he started his elder children at cricket on the common at Littlehampton, and in 1871 when he played golf at St. Andrews. When first married, he promised his wife to reserve Sat.u.r.day afternoons for recreation, and constantly went with her to the Ella concerts. About 1861 she urged him to take exercise by joining Mr.

Herbert Spencer at racquets; but the pressure of work before long absorbed all his time. In his youth he was extremely fond of chess, and played eagerly with his fellow-students at Charing Cross Hospital or with his messmates on board the "Rattlesnake". But after he taught me the game, somewhere about 1869 or 1870, I do not think he ever found time for it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he cared to, or if challenged. n.o.body was more ready in a greater variety of topics, and if they were scientific it was almost always another who introduced them. Unlike some of his comrades of the Royal Society, he was of opinion that man does not live by science alone, and nothing came amiss to him. All his life long he has been in the front of the battle that has raged between science and--not religion, but theology in its more dogmatic form. Even in private the alarm of war is sometimes heard, and Mr. Huxley is not a whit less formidable as a disputant across the table than with pen in hand. Yet an angry man must be very angry indeed before he could be angry with this adversary. He disarmed his enemies with an amiable grace that made defeat endurable if not entirely delightful.

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

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

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

With him (Professor A. Hubrecht (Of Utrecht University.) writes), we his younger disciples, always felt that in acute criticism and vast learning n.o.body surpa.s.sed him, but still what we yet more admired than his learning was his wisdom. It was always a delight to read any new article or essay from his pen, but it was an ever so much higher delight to hear him talk for five minutes. His was the most beautiful and the most manly intellect I ever knew of.

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

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

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

Whether a professor is usually a hero to his demonstrator I cannot say; I only know that, looking back across an interval of many years and a distance of half the circ.u.mference 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 s.h.i.+fty, his firm determination to speak what he held to be truth at whatever cost of popularity. And for these things "I loved the man, and do honour to his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any."

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