XVII
IN THE FAMILY CIRCLE
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.