That was a great group of thinkers to which Huxley belonged.
The Mutual Admiration Society forms the sunshine in which souls
grow--great men come in groups. Sir Francis Galton says there were
fourteen men in Greece in the time of Pericles who made Athens possible.
A man alone is only a part of a man.
Praxiteles by himself could have done nothing. Ictinus might have drawn
the plans for the Parthenon, but without Pericles the noble building
would have remained forever the stuff which dreams are made of. And they
do say that without Aspasia Pericles would have been a mere dreamer of
dreams, and Walter Savage Landor overheard enough of their conversation
to prove it.
William Morris and seven men working with him formed the Preraphaelite
Brotherhood and gave the workers and doers of the world an impetus they
yet feel.
Cambridge and Concord had seven men who induced the Muses to come to
America and take out papers.
These men of the Barbizon School tinted the entire art world: Millet,
Rousseau, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz. And the people who worked a complete
revolution in the theological thought of Christendom were these:
Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Tyndall, Wallace, Huxley and, yes, George Eliot,
who bolstered the brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to think
for himself.
When the victory had become a rout, there were many others who joined
forces with the evolutionists; but at first the thinkers named above
stood together and received the rather unsavory gibes and jeers of those
who get their episcopopagy and science from the same source.
Darwin was the only man in the group who was a university graduate, and
he once said that he owed nothing to his Alma Mater, save the stimulus
derived from her disapproval.
For the work these men had to do there was no precedent: no one had gone
before and blazed a trail.
Learning, like capital, is timid; but ignorance coupled with a desire to
know, is bold. Do I then make a plea for ignorance? Yes, most assuredly.
It is just as well not to know so much, as to be a theologian and know
so many things that are not true.
Learning and institutions of learning subdue men into conformity; only
the man who belongs to nothing is free; and ignorance, as well as a
certain indifference to what the world has said and done, is a necessary
factor in the character of him who would do a great work. It was the
combined ignorance and boldness of Columbus that made it possible for
him to give the world a continent.
Yet the man who has not had a college training often feels he has
somehow missed something valuable: there is timidity and hesitation when
he is in the presence of those who have had "advantages." And Huxley
felt this loss, more or less, up to his thirty-fifth year, when Fate had
him cross swords with college men, and then the truth became his that if
he had had the regular university training, it was quite probable that
he would have accepted the doctrines the universities taught, and would
then have been in the camp of the "enemy," instead of with what he
called the "blessed minority."
Isolation is a great aid to the thinker. Some of the best books the
world has ever known were written behind prison-bars; exile has done
much for literature, and a protracted sea-voyage has allowed many a good
man to roam the universe in imagination. Some of Macaulay's best essays
were written on board slow-going sailing-ships that were blown by
vagrant winds from England to India. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley, all got
their scientific baptism on board of surveying-ships, where time was
plentiful and anything but fleeting, and most everything else was
scarce.
Huxley was only assistant surgeon on the "Rattlesnake," and above him
was a naturalist who much of his time lay in his bunk and read treatises
on this and also on that.
Huxley was the seventh child of a plodding schoolteacher, born on the
seventh day of the week on a seventh-floor back, he used to say. His
genius for work came from his mother, a tireless, ambitious woman, who
got things done while others were discussing them. "Had she been a man,
she would have been leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons,"
her son used to say.
College education was not for that goodly brood--a living was the first
thing, so after a good drilling in the three R's, Thomas Huxley was
apprenticed to a pharmacist who paid him six shillings a week, a sum
that the boy conscientiously gave to his mother.
Oh, if in our schoolteaching we could only teach this one thing: a great
thirst for knowledge! But this desire we can not impart: it is trial,
difficulty, obstacle, deprivation and persecution that make souls hunger
and thirst after knowledge. Young Huxley wanted to know. His
thoroughness in the drugstore won the admiration of the doctors whose
prescriptions he compounded, and several of them loaned him books and
took him to clinics; and at seventeen we find him with a Free
Scholarship in Charing Cross Hospital, serving as nurse and assistant
surgeon. Then came the appointment as assistant surgeon in the Navy, and
the appointment to "H.M.S. Rattlesnake," bound on a four-year trip to
the Antipodes, all quite as a matter of course.
Life is a sequence: this happened today because you did that yesterday.
Tomorrow will be the result of today.
The general idea of evolution was strong in the mind of young Huxley. He
realized that Nature was moving, growing, changing all things. He had
studied embryology, and had seen how the body of a man begins as a
single minute mass of protoplasm, without organs or dimensions.
Behind the ship was his dragnet, and he worked almost constantly
recording the different specimens of animal and vegetable life that he
thus secured. The jellyfish attracted him most.
To the ship's naturalist, jellyfish were jellyfish, but Huxley saw that
there were many kinds, distinct, separate, peculiar. He began to dissect
them and thus began his book on jellyfish, just as Darwin wrote his work
on barnacles.
Huxley vowed to himself that before the "Rattlesnake" got back to
England he would know more about jellyfish than any other living man.
That his ambition was realized no one now disputes.
Among his first discoveries, it came to him with a thrill that a certain
species of jellyfish bears a very close resemblance to the human embryo
at a certain stage.
And he remembered the dictum of Goethe, that the growth of the
individual mirrors the growth of the race. And he paraphrased it thus:
"The growth of the individual mirrors the growth of the species." So
filled was he with the thought that he could not sleep, so he got up and
paced the deck and tried to explain his great thought to the second
mate. He was getting ready for "The Origin of Species," which he once
said to Darwin he would himself have written, if Darwin had been a
little more of a gentleman and had held off for a few years.
It was on board the "Rattlesnake" that Huxley wrote this great truth:
"Nature has no designs or intentions. All that live exist only because
they have adapted themselves to the hard lines that Nature has laid
down. We progress as we comply."
* * * * *
In Australia, while waiting for his ship to locate and map a dangerous
reef, Huxley went ashore, and as he playfully expressed it, "ran upon
another."
The name of the most excellent young woman who was to become his wife
was Henrietta Heathorn; and Julian Hawthorne has discovered that she
belongs to the same good stock from whence came our Nathaniel of Salem.
It did not take the young naturalist and this stranded waif, seven
thousand miles from home, long to see that they had much in common. Both
were eager for truth, both had the ability to cut the introduction and
reach live issues directly. "I saw you were a woman with whom only
honesty would answer," he wrote her thirty years after. He was still in
love with her.
Yet she was a proud soul, and no assistant surgeon on an insignificant
sloop would answer her--when he got his surgeon's commission she would
marry him. And it was seven years before she journeyed to England alone
with that delightful object in view. He had to serve for her as Jacob
did for Rachel, with this difference: Jacob loved several, but Thomas
Huxley loved but one.
Huxley's wife was his companion, confidante, comrade, friend. I can not
recall another so blest, in all the annals of thinking men, save John
Stuart Mill. "I tell her everything I know, or guess, or imagine, so as
to get it straight in my own mind," he said to John Fiske.
In that most interesting work, "Life and Lessons of Huxley," compiled by
his son Leonard, are constant references and allusions to this most
ideal mating. In reply to the question, Is marriage a failure? I would
say, "No, provided the man marries a woman like Huxley's wife, and the
woman marries a man like Huxley."
* * * * *
There is a classic aphorism which runs about this way, "Knock and the
world knocks with you; boost and you boost alone." Like most popular
sayings this is truth turned wrong side out.
John Fiske once called Thomas Huxley an "appreciative iconoclast." That
is to say, Huxley was a persistent protester (which is different from a
protestant), and at the same time, he was a friend who never faltered
and grew faint in time of trouble. Huxley always sniffed the battle from
afar and said, Ha! Ha!
There be those who do declare that the success of Huxley was owing to
his taking the tide at the flood, and riding into high favor on the
Darwinian wave. To say that there would have been no Huxley had there
been no Darwin would be one of those unkind cuts the cruelty of which
lies in its truth.
It is equally true that if there had been no Lincoln there would have
been no Grant; but Grant was a very great man just the same--so why
raise the issue!
Darwin summed up and made nebulæ of the truths which Huxley had, up to
that time, held only in gaseous form.
Darwin was born in the immortal year Eighteen Hundred Nine. Huxley was
born in Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five. When "The Origin of Species" was
published in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, Thomas Huxley was thirty-four
years old. He had made his four years' trip around the world on the
surveying-ship "Rattlesnake," just as Darwin had made his eventful
voyage on the "Beagle."
These men in many ways had paralleled each other; but Darwin had sixteen
years the start, and during these years he had steadily and silently
worked to prove the great truth that he had sensed intuitively years
before in the South Seas.
"The Origin of Species" sheds light in ten thousand ways on the fact
that all life has evolved from very lowly forms and is still ascending:
that species were not created by fiat, but that every species was the
sure and necessary result of certain conditions.
Until "The Origin of Species" was published, and for some years
afterward, the Immutability of Species was taught in all colleges, and
everywhere accepted by the so-called learned men.
Goethe had somewhat dimly prophesied the discovery of the Law of
Evolution, but his ideas on natural science were regarded by the schools
as quite on a par with those of Dante: neither was taken seriously.
Darwin proved his hypothesis. Doubtless, very many schoolmen would have
accepted the theory, but to admit that man was not created outright,
complete, and in his present form, or superior to it, seemed to evolve a
contradiction of the Mosaic account of Creation, and the breaking up of
Christianity. And these things done, many thought, would entail moral
chaos, destruction of private interests and moral confusion being one
and the same thing to those whose interests are involved. And so for
conscience' sake, Darwin was bitterly assailed and opposed.
Opportunity, which knocks many times at each man's door, rapped hard at
Huxley's door in Eighteen Hundred Sixty. It was at Oxford, at a meeting
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: "A big
society with a slightly ironical name," once said Huxley. The audience
was large and fashionable, delegates being present from all parts of the
British Empire.
"The Origin of Species" had been published the year before, and tongues
were wagging. Darwin was not present; but Huxley, who was known to be a
personal friend of Darwin, was in his seat. The intent of the chairman
was to keep Darwin and his pestiferous book out of all the discussions:
Darwin was a good man to smother with silence.
But Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the course of a speech on
another subject began to run short of material, and so switched off upon
a theme which he had already exploited from the pulpit with marked
effect. All public speakers carry this boiler-plate matter for use in
time of stress.
The Bishop began to denounce "those enemies of the Church and Society
who make covert attacks upon the Bible in the name of Science." He
warmed to his theme, and by a specious series of misstatements and
various appeals to the prejudices of his audience worked the assemblage
up to a high pitch of hilarity and enthusiasm. Toward the close of his
speech he happened to spy Huxley seated near, and pointing a pudgy
finger at him, "begged to be informed if the learned gentleman was
really willing to be regarded as a descendant of a monkey?"
As the Bishop sat down, there was a wild burst of applause and much
laughter, but amid the din were calls, "Huxley! Huxley!" These shouts
increased as it came over the people that while the Bishop had made a
great speech, he had gone a trifle too far in ridiculing a member who up
to this time had been silent. The good English spirit of fair play was
at work. Still Huxley sat silent. Then the enemy, thinking he was
completely vanquished, took up the cry with intent to add to his
discomfiture: "Huxley! Huxley!"
Slowly Huxley arose. He stood still until the last buzzing whisper had
died away. When he spoke it was in so low a tone that people leaned
forward to catch his words.
Huxley knew his business: his slowness to speak created an atmosphere.
There was no jest in his voice or manner. The air grew tense.
His quiet reserve played itself off against the florid exuberance of the
Bishop. The Bishop was not a man given to exact statements: his
knowledge of science was general, not specific.
Huxley demolished his card house point by point, correcting the gross
misstatements, and ending by saying that since a question of personal
preferences had been brought into the discussion of a great scientific
theme, he would confess that if the alternatives were a descent on the
one hand from a respectable monkey, or on the other from a Bishop of the
Church of England who could stoop to misrepresentation and sophistry and
who had attempted in that presence to throw discredit upon a man who had
given his life to the cause of science, then if forced to decide he
would declare in favor of the monkey.
When Huxley took his seat, there was a silence that could be felt.
Several ladies fainted. There were fears that the Bishop would reply,
and to keep down such a possible unpleasant move the audience now
applauded Huxley roundly, and amid the din the chairman declared the
meeting adjourned.
From that time forward Huxley was famous throughout England as a man to
let alone in public debate.
* * * * *
It is a fine thing to be a great scientist, but it is a yet finer thing
to be a great man. The one element in Huxley's life that makes his
character stand out clear, sharp and well defined was his steadfast
devotion to truth. The only thing he feared was self-deception. When he
uttered his classic cry in defense of Darwin, there was no ulterior
motive in it; no thought that he was attaching himself to a popular
success; no idea that he was linking his name with greatness.
What he felt was true, he uttered; and the strongest desire of his soul
was that he might never compromise with the error for the sake of mental
ease, or accept a belief simply because it was pleasant.
Huxley once wrote this terse sentence of Gladstone: "It is to me a
serious thing that the destinies of this great country should at present
be to a great extent in the hands of a man who, whatever he may be in
the affairs of which I am no judge, is nothing but a copious shuffler in
those that I do understand." Gladstone crossed swords with Huxley,
Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, and in each case his blundering intellect
looked like a raft of logs compared with a steamboat that responds to
the helm. Gladstone was a man of action, and silence to such is most
becoming.
He had a belief, that was enough; he should have hugged it close, and
never stood up to explain it. Let us vary a simile just used: Lincoln
once referred to an opponent as being "like a certain steamboat that
ran on the Sangamon. This boat had so big a whistle that when she blew
it, there wasn't steam enough to make her run, and when she ran she
couldn't whistle."
Huxley, Spencer and Robert Ingersoll, all made Gladstone cut for the
woods and cover his retreat in a cloud of words. Ingersoll once said
that in replying to Gladstone he felt like a man who had been guilty of
cruelty to children.
If one wants to see how pitifully weak Gladstone could be in an
argument, let him refer to the "North American Review" for Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-two.
Yet Ingersoll was surely lacking in the passion for truth that
characterized Huxley. Ingersoll was always a prosecutor or a defender:
the lawyer habit was strong upon him. Just a little more bias in his
clay and he would have made a model bishop.
His stock of science was almost as meager as was that of Samuel
Wilberforce, and he seldom hesitated to turn the laugh on an adversary,
even at the expense of truth. When brought to book for his indictment of
Moses without giving that great man any credit for the sublime things he
did do, or making allowances for the barbaric horde with which he had to
deal, Bob evaded the proposition by saying, "I am not the attorney of
Moses: he has more than three million men looking after his case."
Again, in that most charming lecture on Shakespeare, Ingersoll proves
that Bacon did not write the plays, by picking out various detached
passages of Bacon, which no one for a moment ever claimed revealed the
genius of the man.
With equal plausibility we could prove that the author of Hamlet was a
weakling, by selecting all the obscure and stupid passages, and parading
these with the unexplained fact that the play opens with the spirit of a
dead man coming back to earth, and a little later in the same play
Shakespeare has the man who interviewed the ghost tell of "that bourne
from whence no traveler returns." Even Shakespeare was not a genius all
the time. And Ingersoll, the searcher for truth, borrowed from his
friends, the priests, the cheerful habit of secreting the particular
thing that would not help the cause in hand. But one of the best things
in Ingersoll's character was that he realized his lapses and in private
acknowledged them.
On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce,
Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little
shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have
had Soapy Sam's job."
This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark
applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear
shovel-hats."
* * * * *
When Thomas Huxley and his wife arrived in New York in Eighteen Hundred
Seventy-six, on a visit to the Centennial Exhibition, this interesting
item was flashed over the country, "Huxley and his titled bride have
arrived in New York on their wedding-journey."
This item caused Mr. and Mrs. Huxley--both of them royal democrats--more
joy than did the most complimentary interview. At home they had left a
charming little brood of seven children, three of them nearly grown-ups.
Huxley sent Tyndall, who a few months before had married a daughter of
Lord Hamilton, the clipping and this note: "You see how that once I am
in a democratic country I am pulling all the honors I can in my own
direction." The next letter the Huxleys received from Tyndall was
addressed, "Sir Thomas and Lady Huxley." Huxley never stood in much awe
of the nobility; he evidently felt that there was another kind of which
he himself in degree was heir. Huxley never had a better friend than Sir
Joseph Hooker, and we see in his letters such postscripts as this:
"Dear Sir Joseph: Do come and dine with us; it is a month since we have
seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on
hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion,
"Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast
aspersions on men made in image of Maker."
* * * * *
The wordy duel between Huxley and Gladstone prompted Toole, the great
comedian, to send a box of grease-paints to Huxley with a note saying,
"These are for you and Gladstone to use when you make up." It was a joke
so subtle and choice that the Huxleys, always dear friends of Toole,
laughed for a week.
Poor Gladstone required a diagram when he heard of the procedure; and
then, not being trepanned for the pleasantry, remarked that if Toole and
Huxley collaborated on the stage, it would be eminently the proper
thing, and in his mind there was little choice between them, both being
fine actors.
Later, we hear of Huxley saying he thought of sending the box of
grease-paints to Gladstone, so the Premier could use them in making up
with God; as for himself, he was like Thoreau and had never quarreled
with Him.
Huxley had many friendships with people seemingly outside of his own
particular line of work. Henry Irving, the Reverend Doctor Parker, John
Fiske and Hall Caine once met at one of Huxley's "Tall Teas," and Doctor
Parker explained that he personally had no objection to visiting with
sinners.
For Parker, Huxley had a great admiration and often attended the
Thursday noon meeting at the Temple, "to see and hear the greatest actor
in England," a compliment which Parker much appreciated, otherwise he
would not have repeated it. "If I ever take to the stage, I will play
the part of Jacques or Touchstone," said Huxley.
John Fiske in his delightful essay on Huxley said that in the Huxley
home there was more jest, joke and banter than in any other place in
London. The air was surcharged with mirth, and puns, often very bad
ones, were tossed back and forth with great recklessness.
At one time John Fiske was at the Huxleys and the dual or multiple
nature of man came up for discussion. Huxley spoke of how very often men
who were gentle and charming in their homes were capable of great
crimes, and of how, on the other hand, a man might pass in the world as
a philanthropist, and yet in his household be a veritable autocrat and
tyrant.
Fiske then incidentally mentioned the case of Doctors Parker and Webster
of Harvard--men of intellect and worth. These men brooded over a
misunderstanding that grew into a grudge and eventually hatched murder.
One worthy professor killed the other, cut up the body, and tried to
burn it in a chemist's retort. Only the great difficulty of reducing the
human body to ashes caused the murder to out, and brought about the
hanging of a scientist of note.
"Yes, I have thought of the difficulty of disposing of a dead body,"
said Huxley, solemnly; "and often when on the point of committing murder
this was the only thing that made me hesitate!"
"Oh, Pater, we are ashamed of you," said his three lovely daughters in
concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous
marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his
time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility
is, in fact, the basic element of wit.
* * * * *
Huxley's duties on the "Rattlesnake" were not in the line of science.
His rank was assistant surgeon; but as sure-enough surgeons were only
sent out on bigger craft, he was this ship's doctor.
With the captain's help the men were kept busy, but not too busy, and
the food and regulations were such that about all Huxley had to do was
to look upon his work and pronounce it good.
As a physician, Huxley practised throughout his life the science of
prevention.
"With a prophetic vision, quite unconscious, my parents named me after
that particular apostle I was to admire most," once said Huxley. He was
a doubter by instinct, and approached the world of Nature as if nothing
were known about it.
His work on the Medusa won him the recognition of the British Society,
and this secured him the coveted surgeon's commission. Two tragedies
confront man on his journey through life--one when he wants a thing and
can not get it; the other when he gets the thing and finds he does not
want it.
Having secured his surgeon's commission, Huxley felt a strong repulsion
toward devoting his life to the abnormal.
"I am a scientist by nature, and my business is to teach," he wrote to
his affianced wife. These were wise words which he had learned from her,
but which he repeated, seemingly quite innocent of their source. We
take our own wherever we find it.
Miss Heathorn admired a surgeon, but loved a scientist, and Huxley being
a man was making a heroic struggle to be what the young woman most
wished. Love supplies an ideal--and that is the very best thing love
does, with possibly an exception or two. So behold a ship's surgeon in
London, full-fledged, refusing offers of position, and even declining to
take a choice of ships, for such is the perversity of things animate and
inanimate that, when we do not want things, Fate brings them to us on
silver platters and begs us to accept. We win by indifference as much as
by desire.
"I have declined to ship on board the 'Cormorant' as head surgeon, and
have applied to the University of Toronto for a position as Professor of
Natural History."
And so America had Huxley flung at her head. Toronto considered, and the
Canadians sat on the case, and after considerable correspondence, the
vacant chair was given to Professor Baldini of the Whitby Ladies
College. It was a close call for Canada! Huxley had imagined that the
New World offered special advantages to a rising young person of
scientific bent, but now he secured a marriage-license and settled down
as lecturer at the School of Mines. A little later he began to teach at
the Royal College of Surgeons, with which institution he was to be
connected the rest of his life, and fill almost any chair that happened
to be vacant.
From the time he was twenty-seven Huxley never had to look for work. He
was known as a writer of worth, and as a lecturer his services were in
demand.
He became President of the Geological and Ethnological Society; was
appointed Royal Commissioner for the Advancement of Science; was a
member of the London School Board; Secretary of the Royal Society; Lord
Rector of the University of Aberdeen; President of the Royal Society;
and refused an offer to become Custodian of the British Museum, a life
position, and where he had once applied for a clerkship.
In letters to Darwin he occasionally signed his name with all titles
added, thus, "Thomas Henry Huxley, M.B., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S. of
Her Majesty's Navy."
Huxley was a forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of
English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was
the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a
speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, sure; and he carried enough
reserve caloric so that he made his presence felt in any assemblage
before he said a word. In oratory it is personality that gives ballast.
Of his forty or so published books, "Man's Place in Nature," "Elementary
Physiology" and "Classification of Animals" have been translated into
many languages, and now serve as textbooks in various schools and
colleges.
Huxley is the founder of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the
peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its
vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used
synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach.
To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but wished to learn.
The controlling impulse of Huxley's life was his absolute honesty. To
pretend to believe a thing against which one's reason revolts, in order
to better one's place in society, was to him the sum of all that was
intellectually base.
He regarded man as an undeveloped creature, and for this creature to lay
the flattering unction to his soul that he was in special communication
with the Infinite, and in possession of the secrets of the Creator, was
something that in itself proved that man was as yet in the barbaric
stage.
Said Huxley: "As to the final truths of Creation and Destiny, I am an
agnostic. I do not know, hence I neither affirm nor deny."
* * * * *
Humor and commonsense usually go together. Huxley had a goodly stock of
both. When George Eliot died, there was a very earnest but ill-directed
effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being
close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was
importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end.
Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that
reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he
placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the
mortification of having to do so.
Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, but this was not to be the final
resting-place of the dust of Mill, Tyndall, Spencer, George Eliot or
Huxley. These had all stood in the fore of the fight against
superstition and had both given and received blows.
The Pantheon of such battle-scarred heroes was to be the hearts of those
who prize above all that earth can bestow the benison of the God within.
"Above all else, let me preserve my integrity of intellect," said
Huxley. Here is Huxley's letter to Spencer: