Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 12

May 3, 1852.

So much occupation has crowded upon me between the beginning of this letter and the present time that I have been unable to finish it. I had undertaken to give a lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution on the 30th April.

It was on a difficult subject, requiring a good deal of thought; and as it was my first appearance before the best audience in London, you may imagine how anxious and nervous I was, and how completely I was obliged to abstract my thoughts from everything else.

However, I am happy to say it is well over. There was a very good audience--Faraday, Professor Forbes, Dr. Forbes, Wharton Jones, and [a]

whole lot of "n.o.bs," among my auditors. I had made up my mind all day to break down, and then go and hang myself privately. And so you may imagine that I entered the theatre with a very pale face, and a heart beating like a sledge-hammer nineteen to the dozen. For the first five minutes I did not know very clearly what I was about, but by degrees I got possession of myself and of my subject, and did not care for anybody. I have had "golden opinions from all sorts of men" about it, so I suppose I may tell you I have succeeded. I don't think, however, that I ever felt so thoroughly used up in my life as I did for two days afterwards. There is one comfort, I shall never be nervous again about any audience; but at one's first attempt, to stand in the place of Faraday and such big-wigs might excuse a little weakness.

The way is clear before me, if my external circ.u.mstances will only allow me to persevere; but I fully expect that I shall have to give up my dreams.

Science in England does everything--but PAY. You may earn praise but not pudding.

I have helping hands held out to me on all sides, but there is nothing to help me to. Last year I became a candidate for a Professors.h.i.+p at Toronto. I took an infinity of trouble over the thing, and got together a ma.s.s of testimonials and recommendations, much better than I had any right to expect. From that time to this I have heard nothing of the business--a result for which I care the less, as I believe the chair will be given to a brother of one of the members of the Canadian ministry, who is, I hear, a candidate. Such a qualification as that is, of course, better than all the testimonials in the world.

I think I told you when I last wrote that I was expecting a grant from Government to publish the chief part of my work, done while away. I am expecting it still. I got tired of waiting the other day and wrote to the Duke of Northumberland, who is at present First Lord of the Admiralty, upon the subject. His Grace has taken the matter up, and I hope now to get it done.

With all this, however, Time runs on. People look upon me, I suppose, as a "very promising young man," and perhaps envy my "success," and I all the while am cursing my stars that my Pegasus WILL fly aloft instead of pulling slowly along in some respectable gig, and getting his oats like any other praiseworthy cart-horse.

It's a charming piece of irony altogether. It is two years yesterday since I left Sydney harbour--and of course as long since I saw Nettie. I am getting thoroughly tired of our separation, and I think she is, though the dear little soul is ready to do anything for my sake, and yet I dare not face the stagnation--the sense of having failed in the whole purpose of my existence--which would, I know, sooner or later beset me, even with her, if I forsake my present object. Can you wonder with all this, my dearest Lizzie, that often as I long for your brave heart and clear head to support and advise me, I yet rarely feel inclined to write? Pray write to me more often than you have done; tell me all about yourself and the Doctor and your children. They must be growing up fast, and Florry must be getting beyond the "Bird of Paradise" I promised her.

Love and kisses to all of them, and kindest remembrances to the Doctor.

Ever your affectionate brother,

T.H. Huxley.

[To Miss Heathorn]

November 13, 1852.

Going last week to the Royal Society's library for a book, and like the boy in church "thinkin' o' naughten," when I went in, Weld, the a.s.sistant Secretary, said, "Well, I congratulate you." I confess I did not see at that moment what any mortal man had to congratulate me about.

I had a deuced bad cold, with rheumatism in my head; it was a beastly November day and I was very grumpy, so I inquired in a state of mild surprise what might be the matter. Whereupon I learnt that the Medal had been conferred at the meeting of the Council on the day before. I was very pleased...and I thought you would be so too, and I thought moreover that it was a fine lever to help us on, and if I could have sent a letter to you immediately I should have sat down and have written one to you on the spot. As it is I have waited for official confirmation and a convenient season.

And now...shall I be very naughty and make a confession? The thing that a fortnight ago (before I got it) I thought so much of, I give you my word I do not care a pin for. I am sick of it and ashamed of having thought so much of it, and the congratulations I get give me a sort of internal sardonic grin. I think this has come about partly because I did not get the official confirmation of what I had heard for some days, and with my habit of facing the ill side of things I came to the conclusion that Weld had made a mistake, and I went in thought through the whole enormous mortification of having to explain to those to whom I had mentioned it that it was quite a mistake. I found that all this, when I came to look at it, was by no means so dreadful as it seemed--quite bearable in short--and then I laughed at myself and have cared nothing about the whole concern ever since. In truth...I do not think that I am in the proper sense of the word ambitious. I have 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. The honours of men I value so far as they are evidences of power, but with the cynical mistrust of their judgment and my own worthiness, which always haunts me, I put very little faith in them. Their praise makes me sneer inwardly. G.o.d forgive me if I do them any great wrong.

...I feel and know that all the rewards and honours in the world will ever be worthless for me as soon as they are obtained. I know that always, as now, they will make me more sad than joyful. I know that nothing that could be done would give me the pure and heartfelt joy and peace of mind that your love has given me, and, please G.o.d, shall give for many a long year to come, and yet my demon says work! work! you shall not even love unless you work.

Not blinded by any vanity, then, I hope...but viewing this stroke of fortune as respects its public estimation only, I think I must look upon the award of this medal as the turning-point of my life, as the finger-post teaching me as clearly as anything can what is the true career that lies open before me. For whatever may be my own private estimation of it, there can be no doubt as to the general feeling about this thing, and in case of my candidature for any office it would have the very greatest weight. And as you will have seen by my last letter, it only strengthens and confirms the conclusion I had come to. Bid me G.o.d-speed then...it is all I want to labour cheerfully.

November 28.

...You will hear all the details of the Great Duke's state funeral from the papers much better than I can tell you them. I went to the Cathedral [St Paul's] and had the good fortune to get a capital seat--in front, close to the great door by which every one entered. It was bitter cold, a keen November wind blowing right in, and as I was there from eight till three, I expected nothing less than rheumatic fever the next day; however I didn't get it. It was pitiful to see the poor old Marquis of Anglesey--a year older than the Duke--standing with bare head in the keen wind close to me for more than three quarters of an hour. It was impressive enough--the great interior lighted by a single line of light running along the whole circuit of the cornice, and another encircling the dome, and casting a curious illumination over the ma.s.ses of uniforms which filled the great s.p.a.ce. The best of our people were there and pa.s.sed close to me, but the only face that made any great impression upon my memory was that of Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde.

Fancy a very large, broad-winged, and fierce-looking hawk in uniform.

Such an eye!

When the coffin and the mourners had pa.s.sed I closed up with the soldiers and went up under the dome, where I heard the magnificent service in full perfection.

All of it, however, was but stage trickery compared with the n.o.ble simplicity of the old man's life. How the old stoic, used to his iron bed and hard hair pillow, would have smiled at all the pomp--submitting to that, however, and all other things necessary to the "carrying on of the Queen's Government."

I send Tennyson's ode by way of packing--it is not worth much more, the only decent pa.s.sages to my mind being those I have marked.

The day after to-morrow I go to have my medal presented and to dine and make a speech.

[The Royal Medal was conferred on November 30, and the medallists were entertained at the anniversary dinner of the Society on that day. In the words with which the President, the Earl of Rosse, accompanied the presentation of the medal, "it is not difficult," writes Sir M. Foster, "reading between the lines, to recognise the appreciation of a new spirit of anatomical inquiry, not wholly free from a timorous apprehension as to its complete validity." ("In these papers (on the Medusae) you have for the first time fully developed their structure, and laid the foundation of a rational theory for their cla.s.sification."

"In your second paper 'On the Anatomy of Salpa and Pyrosoma,' the phenomena, etc., have received the most ingenious and elaborate elucidation, and have given rise to a process of reasoning, the results of which can scarcely yet be antic.i.p.ated, but must bear in a very important degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be called transcendental physiology." See "Royal Society" Obituary Notices volume 59 page 1.) For the difference between this and the labours of the greatest English comparative anatomist of the time, whose detailed work was of the highest value, but whose generalisations and speculations, based on the philosophy of Oken, proved barren and fruitless, lay in the fact that Huxley, led to it doubtless by his solitary readings in his Charing Cross days, had taken up the method of Von Baer and Johannes Muller, then almost unknown, or at least unused in England--"the method which led the anatomist to face his problems in the spirit in which the physicist faced his."

He had been warned by Forbes not to speak too strongly about the dilatoriness of the Government in the matter of the grant, so he writes:] "I will 'roar you like any sucking dove' at the dinner, though I felt tempted otherwise." [On December 1 he tells how he carried out this advice.]

My dear Forbes,

You will, I know, like to learn how I got on yesterday. The President's address to me had been drawn up by Bell. It was, of course, too flattering, but he had taken hold of the right points in my work--at least I thought so.

Bunsen spoke very well for Humboldt.

There was a capital congregation at the dinner--sixty or seventy Fellows there...

When it came to my turn to return thanks, I believe I made a very tolerable speechification, at least everybody says so. Lord Rosse had alluded to "science having to take care of itself in this country," and in winding up I gave them a small screed upon that text. That you may see I kept your caution in mind, I will tell you as nearly as may be what I said. I told them that I could not conceive that anything I had hitherto done merited the honour of that day (I looked so preciously meek over this), but that I was glad to be able to say that I had so much unpublished material as to make me hopeful of one day diminis.h.i.+ng the debt. I then said, "The Government of this country, of this GREAT country, has been two years debating whether it should grant the three hundred pounds sterling necessary for the publication of these researches. I have been too long used to strict discipline to venture to criticise any act of my superiors, but I venture to hope that before long, in consequence of the exertions of Lord Rosse, of the President of the British a.s.sociation, and the goodwill, which I gratefully acknowledge, of the present Lord of the Admiralty, I shall be able to lay before you something more worthy of to-day's award."

I had my doubts how the n.o.bs would take it, but both Lord Rosse and Sabine warmly commended my speech and regretted I had not said even more upon the subject.

[Some light is thrown upon his habits at this time by the following, part of his letter to Forbes of November 19:--]

I have frequent visits from --. He is a good man, but direfully argumentative, and in that sense to me a bore. Besides that, the creature will come and call upon me at nine or ten o'clock in the morning before I am out of bed, or if out of bed, before I am in possession of my faculties, which never arrive before twelve or one.

[This morning incapacity was of a piece with his hatred of the breakfast-party of the period. To go abroad from home or to do any work before breakfasting ensured him a headache for the rest of the day, so that he never was one of those risers with the dawn who do half a day's work before the rest of the world is astir. And though necessity often compelled him to do with less, he always found eight hours his proper allowance of sleep.

But in the end of 1853 we hear of a reform in his ways, after a bad bout of ill-health, when he rises at eight, goes to bed at twelve, and eschews parties of every kind as far as possible, with excellent results as far as health went.

After his marriage, however, and indeed to the beginning of his last illness, he always rose early enough for an eight o'clock breakfast, after which the working day began, lasting regularly from a little after nine till midnight.

4 Upper York Place, St. John's Wood, February 6, 1853.

Many thanks, my dearest sister, for your kind and thoughtful letter--it went to my heart no little that you, amidst all your trials and troubles, should find time to think so wisely and so affectionately of mine. Though greatly tempted otherwise, I have acted in the spirit of your advice, and my reward, in the shape of honours at any rate, has not failed me, as the Royal Society gave me one of the Royal medals last year. It's a bigger one than I got under your auspices so many years ago, being worth 50 pounds sterling, but I don't know that I cared so much about it.

It was a.s.signed to me quite unexpectedly, and in the eyes of the world I, of course, am greatly the bigger--but I will confess to you privately that I am by no means dilated, and am the identical Boy Tom I was before I achieved the attainment of my golden porter's badge. Curiously it was given for the first Memoir I have in the Royal Society's "Transactions,"

sent home four years ago with no small fear and trembling, and, "after many days," returning with this queer crust of bread. In the speech I had to make at the Anniversary Dinner I grew quite eloquent on that point, and talked of the dove I had sent from my ark, returning, not with the olive branch, but with a sprig of the bay and a fruit from the garden of the Hesperides--a simile which I thought decidedly clever, but which the audience--distinguished audience I ought to have said--probably didn't, as they did not applaud that, while they did some things I said which were incomparably more stupid. This was in November, and I ought to have written to you about it before, my dear Lizzie, but for one thing I am very much occupied, and for the other (shall I confess it?) I was rather puzzled that I had not heard from you since I wrote. Now my useless conscience, which never makes me do anything right in time, is pitching in to me when it is too late.

The medal, however, must not be jested at, as it is most decidedly of practical use in giving me a status in the eyes of those charming people, "practical men," such as I had not before, and I am amused to find some of my friends, whose contempt for my "dreamy" notions was not small in time past, absolutely advising me to take a far more dreamy course than I dare venture upon. However, I take very much my own course now, even as I have done before--Huxley all over.

However, that is enough about myself just now. In the next letter I will tell you more at length about my plans and prospects, which are mostly, I am sorry to say, only provocative of setting my teeth hard and saying, "Never mind, I WILL." But what I write in a hurry about and want you to do at once, is to write to me and tell me exactly how money may be sent safely to you. It is inexpedient to send without definite directions, according to the character you give your neighbours. Don't expect anything vast, but there is corn in Egypt...

Two cla.s.ses of people can I deal with and no third. They are the good people--people after my own heart, and the thorough men of the world.

Either of these I can act and sympathise with, but the others, who are neither for G.o.d nor for the Devil, but for themselves, as grim old Dante has it, and whom he therefore very justly puts in a most uncomfortable place, I cannot do with...

So Florry is growing up into a great girl; the child will not remember me, but kiss her and my G.o.dson for me, and give my love to them all. The Lymph shall come in my next letter for the young Yankee. I hope the juices of the English cow will prevent him from ever acquiring the snuffle.

Tell the Doctor all about the medal, with my kindest regards, and believe me, my dearest Lizzie, your affectionate brother,

Tom.

4 Upper York Place, St. John's Wood, April 22, 1853.