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.