Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 1

The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley V.1.

by Leonard Huxley.

VOLUME 1.

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

The American edition of the "Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley"

calls for a few words by way of preface, for there existed a particular relations.h.i.+p between the English writer and his transatlantic readers.

From the time that his "Lay Sermons" was published his essays found in the United States an eager audience, who appreciated above all things his directness and honesty of purpose and the unflinching spirit in which he pursued the truth. Whether or not, as some affirm, the American public "discovered" Mr. Herbert Spencer, they responded at once to the influence of the younger evolutionary writer, whose wide and exact knowledge of nature was but a stepping-stone to his interest in human life and its problems. And when, a few years later, after more than one invitation, he came to lecture in the United States and made himself personally known to his many readers, it was this widespread response to his influence which made his welcome comparable, as was said at the time, to a royal progress.

His own interest in the present problems of the country and the possibilities of its future was always keen, not merely as touching the development of a vast political force--one of the dominant factors of the near future--but far more as touching the character of its approaching greatness. Huge territories and vast resources were of small interest to him in comparison with the use to which they should be put.

None felt more vividly than he that the true greatness of a nation would depend upon the spirit of the principles it adopted, upon the character of the individuals who make up the nation and shape the channels in which the currents of its being will hereafter flow.

This was the note he struck in the appeal for intellectual sincerity and clearness which he made at the end of his New York "Lectures on Evolution." The same note dominates that letter to his sister--a Southerner by adoption--which gives his reading of the real issue at stake in the great civil war. Slavery is bad for the slave, but far worse for the master, as sapping his character and making impossible that moral vigour of the individual on which is based the collective vigour of the nation.

The interest with which he followed the later development of social problems need not be dwelt on here, except to say that he watched their earlier maturity in America as an indication of the problems which would afterwards call for a solution in his own country. His share in treating them was limited to examining the principles of social philosophy on which some of the proposed remedies for social troubles were based, and this examination may be found in his "Collected Essays." But the educational campaign which he carried on in England had its counterpart in America. It was not only that he was chosen to open the Johns Hopkins University as the type of a new form of education; there and elsewhere pupils of his carried out in America his methods of teaching biology, while others engaged in general education would write testifying to the influence of his ideas upon their own methods of teaching. But it must be remembered that nothing was further from his mind than the desire to found a school of thought. He only endeavoured as a scholar and a student to clear up his own thoughts and help others to clear theirs, whether in the intellectual or the moral world. This was the help he steadfastly hoped to give the people, that interacting union of intellectual freedom and moral discernment which may be furthered by good education and training, by precept and example, that basis of all social health and prosperity. And if, as he said, he would like to be remembered as one who had done his best to help the people, he meant a.s.suredly not the people only of his native land, but the wider world to whom his words could be carried.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION.

My father's life was one of so many interests, and his work was at all times so diversified, that to follow each thread separately, as if he had been engaged on that alone for a time, would be to give a false impression of his activity and the peculiar character of his labours.

All through his active career he was equally busy with research into nature, with studies in philosophy, with teaching and administrative work. The real measure of his energy can only be found when all these are considered together. Without this there can be no conception of the limitations imposed upon him in his chosen life's work. The mere amount of his research is greatly magnified by the smallness of the time allowed for it.

But great as was the impression left by these researches in purely scientific circles, it is not by them alone that he made his impression upon the ma.s.s of his contemporaries. They were chiefly moved by something over and above his wide knowledge in so many fields--by his pa.s.sionate sincerity, his interest not only in pure knowledge, but in human life, by his belief that the interpretation of the book of nature was not to be kept apart from the ultimate problems of existence; by the love of truth, in short, both theoretical and practical, which gave the key to the character of the man himself.

Accordingly, I have not discussed with any fulness the value of his technical contributions to natural science; I have not drawn up a compendium of his philosophical views. One is a work for specialists; the other can be gathered from his published works. I have endeavoured rather to give the public a picture, so far as I can, of the man himself, of his aims in the many struggles in which he was engaged, of his character and temperament, and the circ.u.mstances under which his various works were begun and completed.

So far as possible, I have made his letters, or extracts from them, tell the story of his life. If those of any given period are diverse in tone and character, it is simply because they reflect an equal diversity of occupations and interests. Few of the letters, however, are of any great length; many are little more than hurried notes; others, mainly of private interest, supply a sentence here and there to fill in the general outline.

Moreover, whenever circ.u.mstances permit, I have endeavoured to make my own part in the book entirely impersonal. My experience is that the constant iteration by the biographer of his relations.h.i.+p to the subject of his memoir, can become exasperating to the reader; so that at the risk of offending in the opposite direction, I have chosen the other course.

Lastly, I have to express my grateful thanks to all who have sent me letters or supplied information, and especially to Dr. J.H. Gladstone, Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, Professor Howes, Professor Henry Sidgwick, and Sir Spencer Walpole, for their contributions to the book; but above all to Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Michael Foster, whose invaluable help in reading proofs and making suggestions has been, as it were, a final labour of love for the memory of their old friend.

CHAPTER 1.1.

1825-1842.

[In the year 1825 Ealing was as quiet a country village as could be found within a dozen miles of Hyde Park Corner. Here stood a large semi-public school, which had risen to the front rank in numbers and reputation under Dr. Nicholas, of Wadham College, Oxford, who in 1791 became the son-in-law and successor of the previous master.

The senior a.s.sistant-master in this school was George Huxley, a tall, dark, rather full-faced man, quick tempered, and distinguished, in his son's words, by "that glorious firmness which one's enemies called obstinacy." In the year 1810 he had married Rachel Withers; she bore five sons and three daughters, of whom one son and one daughter died in infancy; the seventh and youngest surviving child was Thomas Henry.

George Huxley, the master at Ealing, was the second son of Thomas Huxley and Margaret James, who were married at St. Michael's, Coventry, on September 8, 1773. This Thomas Huxley continued to live at Coventry until his death in January 1796, when he left behind him a large family and no very great wealth. The most notable item in the latter is the "capital Messuage, by me lately purchased of Mrs. Ann Thomas," which he directs to be sold to pay his debts--an inn, apparently, for the testator is described as a victualler. Family tradition tells that he came to Coventry from Lichfield, and if so, he and his sons after him exemplify the tendency to move south, which is to be observed in those of the same name who migrated from their original home in Ches.h.i.+re. This home is represented to-day by a farm in the Wirral, about eight miles from Chester, called Huxley Hall. From this centre Huxleys spread to the neighbouring villages, such as Overton and Eccleston, Clotton and Duddon, Tattenhall and Wettenhall; others to Chester and Brindley near Nantwich. The southward movement carries some to the Welsh border, others into Shrops.h.i.+re. The Wettenhall family established themselves in the fourth generation at Rushall, and held property in Handsworth and Walsall; the Brindley family sent a branch to Macclesfield, whose representative, Samuel, must have been on the town council when the Young Pretender rode through on his way to Derby, for he was mayor in 1746; while at the end of the sixteenth century, George, the disinherited heir of Brindley, became a merchant in London, and purchased Wyre Hall at Edmonton, where his descendants lived for four generations, his grandson being knighted by Charles II in 1663.

But my father had no particular interest in tracing his early ancestry.

"My own genealogical inquiries," he said, "have taken me so far back that I confess the later stages do not interest me." Towards the end of his life, however, my mother persuaded him to see what could be found out about Huxley Hall and the origin of the name. This proved to be from the manor of Huxley or Hodesleia, whereof one Swa.n.u.s de Hockenhull was enfeoffed by the abbot and convent of St. Werburgh in the time of Richard I. Of the grandsons of this Swa.n.u.s, the eldest kept the manor and name of Hockenhull (which is still extant in the Midlands); the younger ones took their name from the other fief.

But the historian of Ches.h.i.+re records the fact that owing to the respectability of the name, it was unlawfully a.s.sumed by divers "losels and lewd fellows of the baser sort," and my father, with a fine show of earnestness, used to declare that he was certain the legitimate owners of the name were far too sober and respectable to have produced such a reprobate as himself, and one of these "losels" must be his progenitor.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing on May 4, 1825, "about eight o'clock in the morning." (So in the Autobiography, but 9.30 according to the Family Bible.) "I am not aware," he tells us playfully in his Autobiography, "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 beehive 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."

As to his debt, physical and mental, to either parent, he writes as follows:--]

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 cla.s.ses of her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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." His early devotion to her was remarkable. Describing her to his future wife he writes:--]

As a child my love for her was a pa.s.sion. 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.

I have next to nothing to say about my childhood (he continues in the Autobiography). In later 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 G.o.d 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.

[There remains no record of his having been a very precocious child.

Indeed, it is usually the eldest child whose necessary companions.h.i.+p with his elders wins him this reputation. The youngest remains a child among children longer than any other of his brothers and sisters.

One talent, however, displayed itself early. The faculty of drawing he inherited from his father. But on the queer principle that training is either unnecessary to natural capacity or even ruins it, he never received regular instruction in drawing; and his draughtsmans.h.i.+p, vigorous as it was, and a genuine medium of artistic expression as well as an admirable instrument in his own especial work, never reached the technical perfection of which it was naturally capable.

The amount of instruction, indeed of any kind, which he received was scanty in the extreme. For a couple of years, from the age of eight to ten, he was given a taste of the unreformed public school life, where, apart from the rough and ready mode of instruction in vogue and the necessary obedience enforced to certain rules, no means were taken to reach the boys themselves, to guide them and help them in their school life. The new-comer was left to struggle for himself in a community composed of human beings at their most heartlessly cruel age, untempered by any external influence.

Here he had little enough of mental discipline, or that deliberate training of character which is a leading object of modern education. On the contrary, what he learnt was a knowledge of undisciplined human nature.]

My regular school training [he tells us], was of the briefest, perhaps fortunately; for though my way of life 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. Almost the only cheerful reminiscence in connection with the place which arises in my mind is that of a battle I had with one of my cla.s.smates, who had bullied me until I could stand it no longer. I was a very slight lad, but there was a wild-cat element in me which, when roused, made up for lack of weight, and I licked my adversary effectually. However, one of my first experiences of the extremely rough-and-ready nature of justice, as exhibited by the course of things in general, arose out of the fact that I--the victor--had a black eye, while he--the vanquished--had none, so that I got into disgrace and he did not. We made it up, and thereafter I was unmolested. One of the greatest shocks I ever received in my life was to be told a dozen years afterwards by the groom who brought me my horse in a stable-yard in Sydney that he was my quondam antagonist. He had a long story of family misfortune to account for his position; but at that time it was necessary to deal very cautiously with mysterious strangers in New South Wales, and on inquiry I found that the unfortunate young man had not only been "sent out," but had undergone more than one colonial conviction.

[His brief school career was happily cut short by the break up of the Ealing establishment. On the death of Dr. Nicholas, his sons attempted to carry on the school; but the numbers declined rapidly, and George Huxley, about 1835, returned to his native town of Coventry, where he obtained the modest post of manager of the Coventry savings bank, while his daughters eked out the slender family resources by keeping school.

In the meantime the boy Tom, as he was usually called, got little or no regular instruction. But 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. Not satisfied with the ordinary length of the day, he used, when a boy of twelve, to light his candle before dawn, pin a blanket round his shoulders, and sit up in bed to read Hutton's "Geology." He discussed all manner of questions with his parents and friends, for his quick and eager mind made it possible for him to have friends.h.i.+ps with people considerably older than himself.

Among these may especially be noted his medical brother-in-law, Dr.

Cooke of Coventry, who had married his sister Ellen in 1839, and through whom he early became interested in human anatomy; and George Anderson May, at that time in business at Hinckley (a small weaving centre some dozen miles distant from Coventry), whom his friends who knew him afterwards in the home which he made for himself on the farm at Elford, near Tamworth, will remember for his genial spirit and native love of letters. There was a real friends.h.i.+p between the two. The boy of fifteen notes down with pleasure his visits to the man of six-and-twenty, with whom he could talk freely of the books he read, and the ideas he gathered about philosophy.

Afterwards, however, their ways lay far apart, and I believe they did not meet again until the seventies, when Mr. May sent his children to be educated in London, and his youngest son was at school with me; his younger daughter studied art at the Slade school with my sisters, and both found a warm welcome in the home circle at Marlborough Place.

One of his boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if their qualities were taken away; and lighting upon Sir William Hamilton's "Logic," he devoured it to such good effect that when, years afterwards, he came to tackle the greater philosophers, especially the English and the German, he found he had already a clear notion of where the key of metaphysic lay.

This early interest in metaphysics was another form of the intense curiosity to discover the motive principle of things, the why and how they act, that appeared in the boy's love of engineering and of anatomy.

The unity of this motive and the accident which bade fair to ruin his life at the outset, and actually levied a lifelong tax upon his bodily vigour, are best told in his own words:--]

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 Inst.i.tute 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. The extraordinary attraction I felt towards the study of the intricacies of living structure nearly proved 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 Warwicks.h.i.+re. I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring morning after my arrival, and throwing open the cas.e.m.e.nt. 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.

[Some little time after his return from the voyage of the "Rattlesnake,"

Huxley succeeded in tracing his good Warwicks.h.i.+re friends again. A letter of May 11, 1852, from one of them, Miss K. Jaggard, tells how they had lost sight of the Huxleys after their departure from Coventry; how they were themselves dispersed by death, marriage, or retirement; and then proceeds to draw a lively sketch of the long delicate-looking lad, which clearly refers to this period or a little later.]