His acquaintance and friendship were eagerly sought, and to those who
entered the circle he gave abundantly of his brilliant gifts and of
friendly affection; but the inmost circle was small--the men who were
comrades and brothers; the sister and the brother united with him in
love and trust; the wife to win whom he served so long, and without
whose sustaining help and comradeship his quick spirit and nervous
temperament could hardly have endured the long and often embittered
struggle.
In this inmost circle he was at once strong and tender. The friend who
most cordially admired his intellectual vigour and unflinching honesty
could write after his death that--
what now dwells most in my mind is the memory of old kindness,
and of the days when I used to see him with (his wife) 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.
Always the home was the inmost centre of his own life. Here he found
personal solace in his long struggle; the sympathy that was the pillar
and stay of his genius, the twin incentive to labour and achievement,
the warmth that gave a fuller value to the light he ensued. None knew
more perfectly than himself what he owed to his life-long companion,
who, in turn, was as much uplifted by his eager spirit as she was
proud to be the cherisher of big aspirations and the active minister
to his attainment. To her critical ear he gave the first reading of
his essays; the judgment and the praise that he most valued were hers,
and, as he put it towards the end of his life, when he was travelling
with his son in Madeira and had been cut off from letters longer than
he liked:--
Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been
horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be
to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to
immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as
wise in that as in other things.
Quick and keen-edged as he was, I cannot recall his ever losing his
temper with any of us at home. Firm he was under his great tenderness
for children; those nearest him felt a certain awe before the
infallible force of his moral judgments; his arbitrament, though
rarely invoked, was instant and final. Going out into the world
afterwards, I think we did not fail to realize how different the
home atmosphere must be where self-control does not rule, and the
inevitable rubs of life find vent in irritable and ill-considered
words.
It was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence that 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 describe
himself, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes
spare half-an-hour just before or just after dinner to draw wonderful
pictures for the little ones, or on a Sunday he would now and then
walk with the elder ones to Hampstead Heath or to the Zoo, where, as
a constant visitant to the prosector's laboratory, he was a well-known
figure, and admitted by the keepers to their arcana. But, while he
often told us stories of the sea and of animals, he did not talk
"shop" to us, as many people seemed to expect by their inquiries
whether we did not receive quite a scientific education from his
companionship.
At the same time, he was anything but a Bohemian. His inborn gaiety
and high spirits, his humour and love of adventure, found from the
first a balance in his love of science; and the rough experience
of his early days intensified by contrast the spiritual serenity
of united love. Lack of order, whether in mind or in outward
surroundings, was no recommendation to him; and so far as the
conventions represented in brief some valid results of social
experience, he observed them and upheld them. They are not always dry
husks out of which reason has evaporated. But where such were merely
unreasoned custom, he was ready to set aside his mere likes and
dislikes on good cause shown, and to follow reason as against the
simple prejudice of custom, even his own.
On the whole, he made his impression on his children more by example
than by spoken precept; much of his attitude may be gathered from a
letter 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 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.
After he had retired from his professorial work and settled down at
Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the advantage of his leisure.
His natural love for children had scope for expression, and children
themselves had an instinctive confidence in the power and sympathy
that irradiated his face and gave his square, rugged features the
beauty of wisdom and kindliness. He could captivate them alike by
lively fun and excellent nonsense, and by lucid explanations of the
wonders of the world about which children love to hear. He fired one
small granddaughter with a love of astronomy, and one day a visitor,
entering unexpectedly, was startled to find the pair of them kneeling
on the floor of the entrance hall before a large sheet of paper, on
which the professor was drawing a diagram of the solar system, with
a little pellet and a big ball to represent earth and sun, while the
child was listening with rapt 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.
One of the most charming unions of the playful and serious was his
letter to the small boy, still under five, who was reading _The Water
Babies_, wherein his grandfather's name is genially made fun of among
the authorities on Water Babies and Water Beasts of every description.
Moreover, there is a picture by Linley Sambourne, showing Huxley and
Owen examining a bottled Water Baby under big magnifying glasses.
Now, as the child greatly desired more light on the reality of Water
Babies, here was an authority to consult. And, as he had already
learned to write, he indited 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 letter" that must be read to
him. The hint bore fruit, and to his carefully pencilled epistle:
Have you seen a Water Baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it
wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day?
came a reply from his grandfather, neatly printed, letter by letter,
very unlike the orderly confusion with which his pen usually rushed
across the paper--to the great perplexity, often, of his foreign
correspondents and sometimes of correspondents nearer home:--
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.
There is a story of Mohammed that once, rather than disturb a
favourite cat, he cut off the sleeve of his robe on which it lay
asleep. Whether in like circumstances my father would have done the
same--had flowing sleeves been a Victorian fashion--I cannot certainly
say, though he once was found similarly dispossessed of his favourite
study chair; but he always regarded this anecdote as displaying
an agreeable trait in the Prophet. For he himself was very fond
of animals, and, though we seldom kept dogs in London, cats were
invariable members of the household. Apropos of these, a letter may
be quoted which was written in 1893 in reply to an inquiry from a
journalist who was collecting anecdotes for an article on the Home
Pets of Celebrities:--
A long series of cats has reigned over my household for the
last forty years, or thereabouts, but I am sorry to say that I
have no pictorial or other record of their physical and moral
excellences.
The present occupant of the throne is a large, young,
grey Tabby--Oliver by name. Not that he is in any sense a
protector, for I doubt whether he has the heart to kill a
mouse. However, I saw him catch and eat the first butterfly
of the season, and trust that this germ of courage, thus
manifested, may develop with age into efficient mousing.
As to sagacity, I should say that his judgment respecting the
warmest place and the softest cushion in a room is infallible;
his punctuality at meal-times is admirable; and his
pertinacity in jumping on people's shoulders, till they
give him some of the best of what is going, indicates great
firmness.