Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 63

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

A well-known popular preacher of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, who had made himself famous by predictions of the speedy coming of the end of the world, was up for election. I was standing by Huxley when the Dean, coming straight from the ballot boxes, turned towards us.]

"Well," [said Huxley], "have you been voting for C.?" ["Yes, indeed I have," replied the Dean.] "Oh, I thought the priests were always opposed to the prophets," [said Huxley.] "Ah!" replied the Dean, with that well-known twinkle in his eye, and the sweetest of smiles, "but you see, I do not believe in his prophecies, and some people say I am not much of a priest."

A few words as to his home life may perhaps be fitly introduced here.

Towards his children he had the same union of underlying tenderness veiled beneath inflexible determination for what was right, which marked his intercourse with those outside his family.

As children we were fully conscious of this side of his character. We felt our little hypocrisies shrivel up before him; we felt a confidence in the infallible rect.i.tude of his moral judgments which inspired a kind of awe. His arbitrament was instant and final, though rarely invoked, and was perhaps the more tremendous in proportion to its rarity. This aspect, as if of an oracle without appeal, was heightened in our minds by the fact that we saw but little of him. This was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence. In the struggle to keep his head above water for the first fifteen or twenty years of his married life, he had scarcely any time to devote to his children. The "lodger,"

as he used to call himself at one time, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes spare half an hour just before or after dinner to draw wonderful pictures for the little ones, and these were memorable occasions. I remember that he used to profess a horror of being too closely watched, or of receiving suggestions, while he drew.

"Take care, take care," he would exclaim, "or I don't know what it will turn into."

When I was seven years old I had the misfortune to be laid up with scarlet fever, and then his gift of drawing was a great solace to me.

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

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

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

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

4 Marlborough Place, December 25, 1878.

Dearest Jess,

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

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

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

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

Ever your loving father,

T.H. Huxley.

[Later on, however, the younger children who kept up the home at Marlborough Place after the elder ones had married or gone out into the world, enjoyed more opportunities of his ever-mellowing companions.h.i.+p.

Strongly as he upheld the conventions when these represented some valid results of social experience, he was always ready to set aside his mere likes and dislikes on good cause shown; to follow reason as against the mere prejudice of custom, even his own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A year after, when Julian had learned to write, and was reading the immortal "Water Babies", wherein fun is poked at his grandfather's name among the authorities on water-babies and water-beasts of every description, he greatly desired more light as to the reality of water-babies. There is a picture by Linley Sambourne, showing my father and Owen examining a bottled water-baby under big magnifying gla.s.ses.

Here, then, was a real authority to consult. So he wrote a letter of inquiry, first anxiously asking his mother if he would receive in reply a "proper letter" that he could read for himself, or a "wrong kind of letter" that must be read to him.

Dear Grandpater,

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

Your loving

Julian.

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

HODESLEA, STAVELEY ROAD, EASTBOURNE, March 24 1892.

My dear Julian

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

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

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

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

Ever

Your loving

Grandpater.

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

Athenaeum Club, May 17, 1892.

Dearest Babs,