XIV
LIFE AND FRIENDSHIPS
"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.