For Huxley, one result of the affair was that he became universally
known, and not merely as he had been known to his immediate circle,
as the most vigorous defender of Darwin--"Darwin's bulldog," as he
playfully called himself. Another result was that he changed his idea
as to the practical value of the art of public speaking. Walking away
from the meeting with that other hater of speech-making, Hooker, he
declared that he would thenceforth carefully cultivate it, and try to
leave off hating it. The former resolution he carried out faithfully,
with the result that he became one of the best speakers of his
generation; in the latter he never quite succeeded. The nervous horror
before making a public address seldom wholly left him; he used to
say that when he stepped on the platform at the Royal Institution and
heard the door click behind him, he knew what it must be like to be
a condemned man stepping out to the gallows. Happily, no sign of
nervousness ever showed itself; he gave the appearance of being
equally master of himself and of his subject. His voice was not
strong, but he had early learnt the lesson of clear enunciation. There
were two letters he received when he began lecturing, and which he
kept by him as a perpetual reminder, labelled "Good Advice." One was
from a "working man" of his Monday evening audience in Jermyn Street,
in 1855; the other, undated, from Mr. Jodrell, a great benefactor of
science, who had heard him at the Royal Institution. These warned him
against his habits of lecturing in a colloquial tone, which might suit
a knot of students gathered round his table, but not a large audience;
of running his words, especially technical terms, together, and of
pouring out unfamiliar matter at breakneck speed. These early faults
were so glaring that one institute in St. John's Wood, after hearing
him, petitioned "not to have that young man again." He worked hard
to cure himself, and the later audiences who flocked to his lectures
could never have guessed at his early failings. The flow was as clear
and even as the arrangement of the matter was lucid; the voice was
not loud, but so distinct that it carried to the furthest benches.
No syllable was slurred, no point hurried over. All this made for
the lucid and comprehensible; well-chosen language and fine utterance
shaped a perfect vehicle of thought. But it was the lucidity of the
thought itself, thus expressed, that gave his lectures their quality.
A clever and accomplished lady once, in intimate conversation, asked
Mrs. Huxley what the reason could be that every one praised her
husband so highly as a lecturer. "I can't understand it. He just lets
the subject explain itself, and that's all." Profound, if unintended,
compliment. It was his power of seeing things clearly, stripped of
their non-essentials, that enabled him to make others see them
clearly also. Nor did he forget the saying of that prince of popular
expositors, Faraday, who, when asked, "How much may a popular lecturer
suppose his audience knows?" replied emphatically, "Nothing." This
same faculty, no doubt, was that which enabled him to write such
admirable elementary text-books--a task which he regarded as one of
the most difficult possible.
A notable description of his public lecturing in the seventies and
early eighties is given by G. W. Smalley, correspondent of the _New
York Tribune_, in his "London Letters":--
[Illustration: From a Photograph by Maull and Polyblank, 1857; To face
p. 44]
I used always to admire the simple and businesslike way in
which Huxley made his entry on great occasions. He hated
anything like display, and would have none of it. At the Royal
Institution, 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-assertion. 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.... 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, flashing 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
magnetized 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.... His manner here, in the
presence of this select and rather limited audience--for the
theatre of the Royal Institution 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 Association 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.
Equally perfect of their kind were his class lectures, which made a
deep and lasting impression on his students. In the words of Jeffery
Parker, afterwards his assistant:--
His lectures were like his writings, luminously clear, without
the faintest disposition to descend to the level of his
audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric
which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high
seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by
an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with
none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation
to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that
comparative anatomy was worthy of the devotion of a life, and
that to solve a morphological problem was as fine a thing
as to win a battle. He was an admirable draughtsman, and his
blackboard illustrations were always a great feature of his
lectures, especially when, to show the relation of two animal
types, he would, by a few rapid strokes and smudges, evolve
the one into the other before our eyes. He seemed to have
a real affection for some of the specimens illustrating his
lectures, and would handle them in a peculiarly loving manner.
When he was lecturing on man, for instance, he would sometimes
throw his arm over the shoulder of the skeleton beside him
and take its hand, as if its silent companionship were an
inspiration. To me, his lectures before his small class at
Jermyn Street or South Kensington were almost more impressive
than the discourses at the Royal Institution, where, for
an hour and a-half, he poured forth a stream of dignified,
earnest, sincere words in perfect literary form, and without
the assistance of a note.
It was no wonder that he was clear and exact in his class lectures,
for he based what he had to say on his own experiment and observation,
and was at pains to verify experimentally the observations of others
which came within his field. Without verification he would not rely
upon them. Indeed, he was so careful to give nothing at second hand
that one of his scientific friends gently reproached him for wasting
his time in re-investigating matters already worked over by competent
observers. "Poor ----," he remarked afterwards, "if that is his own
practice, his work will never live." Of his most important public
addresses, two may be noted as especial _tours de force_. On each
occasion it was specially necessary to speak by the book, but at the
last moment it was impossible to use the carefully prepared notes. One
was the address on the complex and difficult subject of "Animals as
Automata," at the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 1874,
when the atmosphere was electrical after a Presidential address by
John Tyndall which set theologians in an uproar. Years afterwards he
described the incident to Sir E. Ray Lankester:--
I knew that I was treading on very dangerous ground, so I
wrote out uncommonly full and careful notes, and had them in
my hand when I stepped on to the platform.
Then I suddenly became aware of the bigness of the audience,
and the conviction came upon me that, if I looked at my notes,
not one half would hear me. It was a bad ten seconds, but I
made my election and turned the notes face downwards on the
desk.
To this day I do not exactly know how the thing managed to
roll itself out; but it did, as you say, for the best part of
an hour and a-half.
There's a story _pour vous encourager_ if you are ever in a
like fix.
The other was his address at the opening of the John Hopkins
University at Baltimore in 1876. Late on the preceding afternoon he
returned very tired from an expedition to Washington, to find that a
formal dinner and reception awaited him in the evening. He snatched
an hour or two of rest, when a New York reporter arrived demanding the
text of the address, which had to be sent to New York for simultaneous
publication with the Baltimore papers. Now the address was not written
out; it was to be delivered from notes only. From these notes, then,
he delivered it _in extenso_ to the reporter, who took it down in
shorthand, and promised to let him have a copy to lecture from next
morning. But the fair copy did not come till the last moment. To his
horror he found this was written out upon "flimsy," from which it
would be impossible to read properly. Again he turned it down on the
desk and boldly trusted to memory. This second version was taken down
verbatim by the Baltimore reporters in their turn. What if it did not
tally with the New York version? As a matter of fact, it was
almost identical, save for a few curious discrepancies, apparent
contradictions between professed eye-witnesses which the ingenious
critic might perfectly well use to prove that both accounts were
fictitious, and that the pretended original was never delivered under
the conditions alleged.
Mention has been made of his lectures to working men. Of these his
assistant and successor, Professor G.B. Howes, wrote:--
Great as were his class lectures, his working-men's were
greater. Huxley was a great believer in the _distillatio per
ascensum_ of scientific knowledge and culture, and spared
no pains in approaching the artisan and so-called "working
classes." 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 institutes
is regarded by some to have rendered their continuance
unnecessary. He replied, almost with indignation: "With our
central position 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.
He had begun these in 1855, the second year of his appointment at the
Royal School of Mines. On February 27 of that year he wrote to his
friend Dr. Dyster:--
I enclose a prospectus of some People's Lectures (_Popular_
Lectures I hold to be an abomination unto the Lord) I am about
to give here. I want the working classes to understand that
Science and her ways are great facts for them--that physical
virtue is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean
and temperate and all the rest, not because fellows in black
with white ties tell them so, but because these are plain and
patent laws of nature which they must obey "under penalties."
I am sick of the _dilettante_ middle class, and mean to try
what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among
facts.
And in May, after referring to his Preliminary Course and the
earnestness and attention of his audience, he adds that he has begun
his similar course to working men exclusively--a series of six, given
in turn by each Professor:--
The theatre holds 600, and is crammed full. I believe in the
fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze
and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I
would willingly give some when I come to Tenby [Dr. Dyster's
home].
Moreover, he took a practical interest in the corresponding movement
set afoot by F.D. Maurice, and gave occasional addresses at the
Working Men's College between 1857 and 1877, the last of which was
that delightful discourse on science as "trained and organized common
sense" which bears the alluring title of "The Method of Zadig."