"To live laborious days" was, for Huxley, at all times a necessity as
well as a creed. The lover of knowledge and truth, he firmly believed,
must devote his uttermost powers to their service; he held as strongly
that every man's first duty to society was to support himself. But
science provided more fame than pence, and with wife and family to
support he was spurred to redoubled efforts. In the early years of
married life especially, while he was still struggling to make
his way, he often felt the pinch. He added to his modest income by
reviewing and translating scientific books and by lecturing. On
one occasion, when he was a candidate for a certain scientific
lectureship, one of the committee of election, a wealthy man,
expressed astonishment at his application--"what can he want with a
hundred a year?" "I dare say," commented Huxley, "he pays his cook
that." In early days, visioning the future, he and his wife had fondly
planned to marry on £400 a year, while he pursued science, unknown
if need be, for the sake of science. The reality pressed hardly upon
them; those were dark evenings when he would come home fagged out by
a second lecture at the end of a full day's work and lay himself down
wearily on one couch, while she, so long a semi-invalid, lay uselessly
on another. And, later, the upbringing of a large family, though its
advent made life the more worth living, involved a heavy strain. At
the same time, a man who was ever ready to take up responsibilities
for the furtherance of every branch of science with which he was
concerned had endless responsibilities committed to him. Besides
his researches in pure science, whether anatomy, paleontology, or
anthropology, his regular teaching work and other courses of lectures,
his long work as examiner at the London University, the production of
scientific memoirs and text-books and more general essays, he took
a leading share in editing the _Natural History Review_ for two and
a-half years; he was an active supporter of the chief scientific
societies to which he belonged, and took a prominent part in their
administration as member of council, secretary, or president, the
most laborious period of which was during the nine years of his
secretaryship of the Royal Society, soon to be followed by the
presidency. Add to these his service on the School Board and no less
than eight Royal Commissions, and it is easy to see that the longest
working days he could contrive were always filled and over-filled.
When very tired he would occasionally dash off for a week or two's
walking with a friend in Wales, or some corner of France; two summer
holidays in Switzerland with John Tyndall resulted in a joint paper on
the "Structure of Glacier Ice"; later, the family holidays by the
sea regularly saw a good deal of time devoted to writing, while his
exercise consisted of long walks.
Unlike Darwin, who at last found nothing save science engrossing
enough to make him oblivious of his constant ill-health, Huxley
never lost his keen delight in literature and art. He was a rapid and
omnivorous reader, devouring everything from a fairy tale to a blue
book, and tearing the heart out of a book at express speed. With this
went a love of great and beautiful poetry and of prose expression that
is at once exact and artistically balanced. "I have a great love and
respect for my native tongue," he wrote, "and take great pains to use
it properly. Sometimes I write essays half-a-dozen times before I can
get them into the proper shape; and I believe I become more fastidious
as I grow older." Indeed, even after much re-writing, his corrections
in proof must have appalled his publishers. "Science and literature,"
he declared, "are not two things, but two sides of one thing." "Have
something to say, and say it," was the great Duke's theory of
style. "Say it in such language," added Huxley, "that you can stand
cross-examination on every word. Be clear, though you may be convicted
of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact
some time and get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and
study chiefly to use language which will give a loophole of escape
either way, there is no hope for you."
Herein lay the secret of his lucidity. Uniting the scientific habit
of mind with the literary art, he showed that truthfulness need not
be bald, and that power lies rather in accuracy than in luxuriance of
diction. As to the influence which such a style exerted on the habit
of mind of his readers, there is remarkable testimony in a letter from
Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the _Life of Huxley_, ii,
239. Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence
of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning
of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless
superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he
had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have
produced the same effect upon him.
Huxley's own criticism of the one and only poem be ever published
is also instructive. On his way back from the funeral of Tennyson in
Westminster Abbey, he spent the journey in shaping out some lines on
the dead poet, the germ of which had come into his mind in the Abbey.
These, with a number of other tributes to Tennyson by professed poets,
were printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ for November, 1892. He writes
in a private letter:--
If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the
others, I should say that as to style it is hammered, and as
to feeling, human.
They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly
poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think
there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience
would have boggled over.
As regards the arts other than literary, he had a keen eye for a
picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtman's
and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour. To
good music, also, he was always susceptible; as a young man he used to
sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. In music,
as in painting, he was untrained. Yet, as has been noted already, his
illustrations to MacGillivray's _Voyage of the Rattlesnake_ and his
holiday sketches suggest that he might have gone far had he been
trained as an artist.
When first married he used to set aside Saturday afternoons to take
his wife to the Ella concerts, fore-runners of the "Saturday Pops.,"
but it was not very long before the pressure of circumstance forbade
this pleasure. Later, he very occasionally managed to go to the
theatre; but his chief recreation, apart from change of work and the
rapid devouring of a good novel, was in meeting his friends, when
occasion offered, at the scientific societies or at dinner, or now
and then in country visits which had not yet received the name of
"week-ends."
When, in the middle seventies, his position was firmly established and
he was living in a roomy house, No. 4 Marlborough Place, St. John's
Wood, there were gatherings of friends on Sunday evenings. An informal
meal awaited the guests, who came either on a general invitation or
when specially bidden; others put in an appearance later. There would
be much talk, from grave to gay, in those plainly appointed rooms, or
on a fine summer evening, perhaps, in the garden with its little lawn
behind the house. Some music, too, was almost sure to be performed by
friends or by the daughters of the house, whose progress in the art of
singing was ever a matter of concern to Mr. Herbert Spencer, himself
a great lover of music. Letters and Art were well represented there
as well as Science, intermingled with the friends of the younger
generation. "Here," writes G.W. Smalley,
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, and, when
artistic, free from affectation.
There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he
cared to, or if challenged. Nobody 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....
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.
If scientific subjects came up in conversation, the luminous style, so
familiar in his written work, reappeared in talk.
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 in the intermediate period, from about 1860 onwards, the unceasing
rush of occupation rendered it very difficult to keep in touch with
his friends. On his initiative a small dining club of scientific
friends and allies was established. Almost all these close friends
were members of the Royal Society, and were likely to attend its
meetings. Dinner, therefore, was to be taken at a convenient hotel
before the monthly meeting of the Society, and those who were
inevitably drifting apart under the stress of circumstances would
have a regular meeting ground. This was the famous _x_ Club, a name
singularly appropriate on the principle of _lucus a non lucendo_ to a
club of nine members who never proceeded to the election of a tenth.
Opinions as to the name and constitution of the little society
being no less numerous than the members--indeed more so--"we finally
accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the _x_
Club; and the proposal of some genius among us that we should have
no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by
acclamation."
Huxley first propounded the scheme to his most intimate friends,
Joseph Dalton Hooker, then Assistant Director of Kew, and John
Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution.
George Busk, the anatomist, afterwards President of the College of
Surgeons, was another whose friendship dated from soon after
the return of the _Rattlesnake_ to England. Herbert Spencer, the
philosopher, and Sir John Lubbock, banker and naturalist, were friends
of nearly as long standing. Edward Frankland, Professor of Chemistry
at the Royal Institution, and Thomas Archer Hirst, Professor of
Physics and Pure Mathematics at University College, London, afterwards
Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich,
entered the circle as special friends of Tyndall's. William
Spottiswoode, Queen's Printer and mathematician, was the ninth member,
elected by the rest at the first meeting.
Between them they could have managed to contribute most of the
articles to a scientific Encyclopædia: six were Presidents of the
British Association; three were Associates of the Institute of France;
and from among them the Royal Society chose a Secretary, a Foreign
Secretary, a Treasurer, and three successive Presidents. Meeting
though they did for the sake of friendship and good fellowship, it
was inevitable that they should discuss the burning questions of the
scientific world freely from varied points of view, and, being all
animated by similar ideas of the high function of science and of the
great Society, the chief representative of science to which all but
one of them belonged, they incidentally exercised a strong influence
on the progress of scientific organization.
The first meeting took place on November 3, 1864; nearly nineteen
years passed before the circle was broken by the death of
Spottiswoode. Proposals were made to fill the gap with a new friend,
but, as the _raison d'être_ of the club had been simply the personal
attachment of the original nine, the project fell through. Finally,
after Hirst's death in 1892, when five out of the remaining six were
living away from London and for the most part in uncertain health,
it became more and more difficult to arrange a meeting, and the club
quietly lapsed after nearly twenty-eight years of existence.
Guests were often entertained at the _x_ dinners, men of science or
letters of almost every nationality--a delightful and quite informal
mode of personal intercourse. In the summer, also, the _x_ often made
a week-end expedition into the country or up the river, in which the
wives of the married members took part, the formula for the invitation
being _x's + yv's_.