THE lectures at the Royal Institution were of some help to me. I
attended courses by Owen, Tyndall, Huxley, and Bain. Of these, Huxley
was _facile princeps_, though both Owen and Tyndall were second to no
other. Bain was disappointing. I was a careful student of his books,
and always admired the logical lucidity of his writing. But to the mixed
audience he had to lecture to—fashionable young ladies in their teens,
and drowsy matrons in charge of them, he discreetly kept clear of
transcendentals. In illustration perhaps of some theory of the relation
of the senses to the intellect, he would tell an amusing anecdote of a
dog that had had an injured leg dressed at a certain house, after which
the recovered dog brought a canine friend to the same house to have his
leg—or tail—repaired. Out would come all the tablets and pretty pencil
cases, and every young lady would be busy for the rest of the lecture in
recording the marvellous history. If the dog’s name had been ‘Spot’ or
‘Bob,’ the important psychological fact would have been faithfully
registered. As to the theme of the discourse, that had nothing to do
with—millinery. And Mr. Bain doubtless did not overlook the fact.
Owen was an accomplished lecturer; but one’s attention to him depended on
two things—a primary interest in the subject, and some elementary
acquaintance with it. If, for example, his subject were the comparative
anatomy of the cycloid and ganoid fishes, the difference in their scales
was scarcely of vital importance to one’s general culture. But if he
were lecturing on fish, he would stick to fish; it would be essentially a
_jour maigre_.
With Huxley, the suggestion was worth more than the thing said. One
thought of it afterwards, and wondered whether his words implied all they
seemed to imply. One knew that the scientist was also a philosopher; and
one longed to get at him, at the man himself, and listen to the lessons
which his work had taught him. At one of these lectures I had the honour
of being introduced to him by a great friend of mine, John Marshall, then
President of the College of Surgeons. In later years I used to meet him
constantly at the Athenæum.
Looking back to the days of one’s plasticity, two men are pre-eminent
among my Dii Majores. To John Stuart Mill and to Thomas Huxley I owe
more, educationally, than to any other teachers. Mill’s logic was simply
a revelation to me. For what Kant calls ‘discipline,’ I still know no
book, unless it be the ‘Critique’ itself, equal to it. But perhaps it is
the men themselves, their earnestness, their splendid courage, their
noble simplicity, that most inspired one with reverence. It was Huxley’s
aim to enlighten the many, and he enlightened them. It was Mill’s lot to
help thinkers, and he helped them. _Sapere aude_ was the motto of both.
How few there are who dare to adopt it! To love truth is valiantly
professed by all; but to pursue it at all costs, to ‘dare to be wise’
needs daring of the highest order.
Mill had the enormous advantage, to start with, of an education unbiassed
by any theological creed; and he brought exceptional powers of abstract
reasoning to bear upon matters of permanent and supreme importance to all
men. Yet, in spite of his ruthless impartiality, I should not hesitate
to call him a religious man. This very tendency which no imaginative
mind, no man or woman with any strain of poetical feeling, can be
without, invests Mill’s character with a clash of humanity which entitles
him to a place in our affections. It is in this respect that he so
widely differs from Mr. Herbert Spencer. Courageous Mr. Spencer was, but
his courage seems to have been due almost as much to absence of sympathy
or kinship with his fellow-creatures, and to his contempt of their
opinions, as from his dispassionate love of truth, or his sometimes
passionate defence of his own tenets.
My friend Napier told me an amusing little story about John Mill when he
was in the East India Company’s administration. Mr. Macvey Napier, my
friend’s elder brother, was the senior clerk. On John Mill’s retirement,
his co-officials subscribed to present him with a silver standish. Such
was the general sense of Mill’s modest estimate of his own deserts, and
of his aversion to all acknowledgment of them, that Mr. Napier, though it
fell to his lot, begged others to join in the ceremony of presentation.
All declined; the inkstand was left upon Mill’s table when he himself was
out of the room.
Years after the time of which I am writing, when Mill stood for
Westminster, I had the good fortune to be on the platform at St. James’s
Hall, next but one to him, when he made his first speech to the electors.
He was completely unknown to the public, and, though I worshipped the
man, I had never seen him, nor had an idea what he looked like. To
satisfy my curiosity I tried to get a portrait of him at the photographic
shop in Regent Street.
‘I want a photograph of Mr. Mill.’
‘Mill? Mill?’ repeated the shopman, ‘Oh yes, sir, I know—a great
sporting gent,’ and he produced the portrait of a sportsman in top boots
and a hunting cap.
Very different from this was the figure I then saw. The hall and the
platform were crowded. Where was the principal personage? Presently,
quite alone, up the side steps, and unobserved, came a thin but tallish
man in black, with a tail coat, and, almost unrecognised, took the vacant
front seat. He might have been, so far as dress went, a clerk in a
counting-house, or an undertaker. But the face was no ordinary one. The
wide brow, the sharp nose of the Burke type, the compressed lips and
strong chin, were suggestive of intellect and of suppressed emotion.
There was no applause, for nothing was known to the crowd, even of his
opinions, beyond the fact that he was the Liberal candidate for
Westminster. He spoke with perfect ease to himself, never faltering for
the right word, which seemed to be always at his command. If interrupted
by questions, as he constantly was, his answers could not have been
amended had he written them. His voice was not strong, and there were
frequent calls from the far end to ‘speak up, speak up; we can’t hear
you.’ He did not raise his pitch a note. They might as well have tried
to bully an automaton. He was doing his best, and he could do no more.
Then, when, instead of the usual adulations, instead of declamatory
appeals to the passions of a large and a mixed assembly, he gave them to
understand, in very plain language, that even socialists are not
infallible,—that extreme and violent opinions, begotten of ignorance, do
not constitute the highest political wisdom; then there were murmurs of
dissent and disapproval. But if the ignorant and the violent could have
stoned him, his calm manner would still have said, ‘Strike, but hear me.’
Mr. Robert Grosvenor—the present Lord Ebury—then the other Liberal member
for Westminster, wrote to ask me to take the chair at Mill’s first
introduction to the Pimlico electors. Such, however, was my admiration
of Mill, I did not feel sure that I might not say too much in his favour;
and mindful of the standish incident, I knew, that if I did so, it would
embarrass and annoy him.
Under these circumstances I declined the honour.
When Owen was delivering a course of lectures at Norwich, my brother
invited him to Holkham. I was there, and we took several long walks
together. Nothing seemed to escape his observation. My brother had just
completed the recovery of many hundred acres of tidal marsh by
embankments. Owen, who was greatly interested, explained what would be
the effect upon the sandiest portion of this, in years to come; what the
chemical action of the rain would be, how the sand would eventually
become soil, how vegetation would cover it, and how manure render it
cultivable. The splendid crops now grown there bear testimony to his
foresight. He had always something instructive to impart, stopping to
contemplate trifles which only a Zadig would have noticed.
‘I observe,’ said he one day, ‘that your prevailing wind here is
north-west.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Look at the roots of all these trees; the large roots are invariably on
the north-west side. This means that the strain comes on this side. The
roots which have to bear it loosen the soil, and the loosened soil
favours the extension and the growth of the roots. Nature is beautifully
scientific.’
Some years after this, I published a book called ‘Creeds of the Day.’ My
purpose was to show, in a popular form, the bearings of science and
speculative thought upon the religious creeds of the time. I sent Owen a
copy of the work. He wrote me one of the most interesting letters I ever
received. He had bought the book, and had read it. But the important
content of the letter was the confession of his own faith. I have
purposely excluded all correspondence from these Memoirs, but had it not
been that a forgotten collector of autographs had captured it, I should
have been tempted to make an exception in its favour. The tone was
agnostic; but timidly agnostic. He had never freed himself from the
shackles of early prepossessions. He had not the necessary daring to
clear up his doubts. Sometimes I fancy that it was this difference in
the two men that lay at the bottom of the unfortunate antagonism between
Owen and Huxley. There is in Owen’s writing, where he is not purely
scientific, a touch of the apologist. He cannot quite make up his mind
to follow evolution to its logical conclusions. Where he is forced to do
so, it is to him like signing the death warrant of his dearest friend.
It must not be forgotten that Owen was born more than twenty years before
Huxley; and great as was the offence of free-thinking in Huxley’s youth,
it was nothing short of anathema in Owen’s. When I met him at Holkham,
the ‘Origin of Species’ had not been published; and Napier and I did all
we could to get Owen to express some opinion on Lamarck’s theory, for he
and I used to talk confidentially on this fearful heresy even then. But
Owen was ever on his guard. He evaded our questions and changed the
subject.
Whenever I pass near the South Kensington Museum I step aside to look at
the noble statues of the two illustrious men. A mere glance at them, and
we appreciate at once their respective characters. In the one we see
passive wisdom, in the other militant force.