BOOKS.
PROFESSORHUXLEY'S LIFE.*
TAKING it as a whole, this is an admirable biography, since it is to so great an extent autobiography. Mr. Huxley lets his father speak for himself through his letters and conversation, and only contributes so much of connected narrative as to render perfectly intelligible what Huxley had to say. The work might, in our judgment, have been somewhat more com- pressed by excluding here and there letters of a purely ephemeral character. A few episodes and bitter sayings might also have been omitted. For instance, Huxley, as might have been expected, disliked Plato as the intellectual father of great ideas undreamed of in his own rigid philosophy. It is right to tell us that, but it was unnecessary to inform us that Sir Henry Holland said to Huxley that he always thought " Plato an ass." If he did, so much the worse for Sir Henry Holland, whose foolish observation might have been sup- pressed in consideration of his good work in spheres of life which he happened to understand. There are other references which are also painful, but both the Huxleys, pare et fill, are too earnestly bent on what they sincerely regard as truth to care for personal feelings. In the main, however, we have no words but those of praise for this faithful portraiture of a strong and great character, whose positive work will remain long after his prejudices and his narrow philosophy are for- gotten.
• Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. By his Son, Leonard Huxley. 2 vols. London ; Macmillan and Co. 00s. net.]
To note within the limits of a review all the details of Huxley's crowded life is impossible; we must content our- selves mainly with the impression produced by this record.
His supreme virtue seems to us to have been the love of truth, not merely truth in the sense of verbal accuracy, but mm-a), and mental sincerity. Like Dr. Johnson, he persisted in clear• ing his mind of cant. We think his agnosticism (he coined the word) a poor and narrow creed, but such as it was he stuck to it and would never profess to acquiesce in what he did not heartily believe. " Truthfulness, in his eyes," writes his son, " was the cardinal virtue, without which no stable society can exist. Conviction, sincerity, he always respected, whether on his own side or against him. Clever men, he would say, are as common as blackberries ; the rare thing is to find a good one. The lie from interested motives was only more hateful to him than the lie from self-delusion or foggy thinking." This great quality, accompanied as it was by intense zeal and what Charles Lamb called " imperfect sympathies," led him to un• just criticism of men he did not understand (Owen, J. H. Newman, Gladstone) ; but we must reckon to him for righteousness this salt of the moral life, particularly in an age of feeble convictions and much slipshod morality. Next comes his amazing industry, the more wonderful when we consider his weak health. A martyr to dyspepsia and en. larged heart, perpetually needing change of air, flying from Welsh hills and Yorkshire moors to Madeira and the Enga. dine, he seems never to have had an idle moment, even his last days at Eastbourne being filled with gardening, correspondence, and the study of heavy tomes on history and theology. The list of his writings fills twenty pages in these volumes and covers most subjects of human interest as well as scientific monographs. Everything he did was done well. He made no errors, he verified everything, and even in his minor writings his English was above reproach. In mature life, like Cato, he took up the study of Greek, and seems to have made good progress in it. Though his father, George Huxley, was a schoolmaster at Ealing (where T. H. H. was born in 1825), the boy had no good education, but by dint of sheer hard work, aided by a retentive memory, he made himself master of French, German, and Italian. So good a French scholar was he that Professor Lacaze du Thiers wrote to him : " On me dit que vous ecrivez si bien le Francais que je crois que je vous lirais bien mieux dans ma langue !" Huxley himself says that he could " tear the heart out" of a book in a short while, though he had little verbal memory ; on no other hypothesis could his prodigious reading be ac- counted for. He had not a few of the best gifts of human nature. He admits a hot temper, he certainly did not suffer fools gladly, but he was the soul of affection to his wife (whom he first met in his early scientific expedition to Australia) and his children, and he was staunch and loyal to his friends, none of whom he seems to have deserted. He was as eager to help a poor workman at Southampton whom he heard of as studying science under difficult conditions as he was to secure a Civil List pension for Alfred Russel Wallace or W. K. Clifford's widow. Those who knew him but slightly thought him cold ; his friends found in him a warm human heart.
It is interesting to note how wide his interests were. No dryasdust he ; his letters are filled with every subject of human interest, and he touched life at every point. He passes from the vertebrae to the School Board, from the crayfish to Parnellism, from glaciers to original sin,—which he believed in. Even while a boy, and while struggling, after making valuable original investigations in the Rattlesnake ' expedition, for a decent living, he was ever speculating and arguing with ardent pugnacity on all manner of subjects. After laborious scientific work (his normal working day was from 9 a.m. till midnight) he would go with Mr. Herbert Spencer to the Opera, or to dine with the X Club (a small and select group of men of science), or lecture to working men, or to the Royal Institution, or rush off to the Metaphysical Society, where he and W. G. Ward were thought to be the best reasoners, or he would dash of a heap of correspondence, or produce a learned monograph "on the premolar teeth of Diprotodon," or—what he liked best of all—plunge into controversy with a theologian. He seemed to derive health from his controversy with Mr. Gladstone on the "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture." Natural science
was of course the chief mistress of his affections, but he wrote on education, metaphysics, religion, sociology, with equal facility; he served on the London School Board and on Com- missions innumerable, find in everything he gave of his best, even when his' body was weak and his mind depressed. He was very human, and perhaps his anti-religious bias was no more due to intellectual difficulties than to a certain earthy ten- dency which he admits. He frankly says that he " loves his friends and hates his enemies," and he counts this a good working creed. His sense of humour was keen, as witness this letter to Matthew Arnold :—" Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness and then inspect your umbrella-stand. You will there see a beautiful brown, smooth-handled umbrella, which is not your property. Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and bring it with you next time you come to the club." (It seems that Bishops are not the sole " conveyers " of umbrellas at the Athenteutn.) He relates with gusto that "R. G. Latham, queerest of men, had singular flashes of insight now and then. Forty years ago he gravely told me that the existence of the Established Church was to his mind one of the best evidences of the recency of the evolution of the human type from the simian." He laughed at himself in the Cambridge doctorate red gown, and in the solemn Osborne function when he was made Privy Councillor, at which Mr. Jesse Collings, taking a stealthy look at the Queen, found that she was simultaneously taking a stealthy look at Mr. Jesse Collings. Even to the last we find a fund of energy, a variety of interests, a delight in all things human, and a kind of overflowing of life.
In spite of alternate abuse of his countrymen for their banal politics and bad education, and poking fun at them for their bibliolatry, Huxley was a thorough Englishman, with all the national strength and some of its failings. He thought the Italians and the English had the best intellects in Europe, though, singularly enough, he did not find the charm in Italy which most of us discover. He yawned in the picture galleries and found only " mummery " in the churches. The Pantheon was the chief thing in Rome that interested him. He was, perhaps, a little too English to have meddled with philosophy. What he thought of some of its problems may be inferred from his Hume and from his lecture on Descartes. In the latter, though he would have denied it, he practically abandons' morality, for he would prefer to be wound up and set going if he might always do " right," than be a free agent sometimes doing wrong. Such talk sug- gests that he did not understand that freedom is a con- dition of right, and that automatic action precludes the very conception of what " right" is. His rigid agnosticism, especially as set forth in some correspondence with Charles Kingsley, would not admit the idea of any God to whom Christ's word " Father " might apply. The facts of life and Nature were against it, and there was no evidence for it, for he thought the whole Bible broke down as against criticism. Immortality might be, but even at the death-bed of his little son he would not yield an inch. Yet he makes a striking admission, which every man in his sincere moments must make, in a letter to Mr. Morley :—" It is a curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all sorts of times with a sort of horror that in 1900 I shall pro- bably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell a good deal,—at any rate in one of the upper circles, where the climate and company are not boo trying." He not only disbelieved in Christianity, he hated priests and churches, disliked the idea of George Eliot being buried in Westminster Abbey (though he himself had a Christian burial), and made quite a fuss when Lord Rector of Aberdeen about attending a Presbyterian service. Yet, on the other hand, he detested mere ribald treatment of religion, and he believed strongly in reading the Bible, as he showed when on the London School Board. Yes, there was a good deal of British human nature in him, despite his " rigour and vigour." He was not a countryman of Voltaire or Nietzsche. Politic- ally he was no partisan, but he always leaned to Radicalism, though with the scientific man's distrust of the populace. In 1866 he took up, along with Mill, the prosecution of Eyre, he was with the North in the Civil War, and he rejoiced over the fall of Louis Napoleon. When the Home-rule con- troversy arose, he took the Unionist side, though he confesses
to a " blackguardly " sympathy for Parnell. But in his late years he thought the two questions of the maintenance of English industry and the diminution of English poverty the supreme questions. If poverty could not be suppressed, he would, he said, welcome the advent of some "friendly comet" to end the human tragedy.
Though Huxley apparently did not care for painting, he loved music. He had some facility in drawing little humorous sketches, which often were sandwiched in his correspondence. In literature his son admits that Huxley ought to have cared for Wordsworth more than he did. Shelley he found, as Arnold did, too diffuse. His greatest pleasure was derived from Shakespeare and Milton; for "simple beauty" he turned to Keats, he loved Browning's earlier poems, and he loved Tennyson as the greatest of all modern poets who had been influenced by science. Surely this is too great a claim for Tennyson when we recall Goethe; especially as Huxley found in the writings of Goethe "a moral grandeur to be ranked with that of the Hebrew prophets." He was also, like Darwin, a great novel-reader, but his chief delight was in philosophy and history.
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