As another instance, the following from his address on a "Liberal Education" may be taken. He had been discussing the intellectual advantage to be derived from classical studies, and had been comparing, to the disadvantage of the latter, the intellectual discipline which might be got from a study of fossils with the discipline claimed by the ordinary experts upon education to be the results of classical training. He wished to anticipate the obvious objection to his argument: that the subject-matter of palæontology had no direct bearing on human interests and emotions, while the classical authors were rich in the finest humanity.
"But it will be said that I forget the beauty and the human interest, which appertain to classical studies. To this I reply that it is only a very strong man who can appreciate the charms of landscape as he is toiling up a steep hill, along a bad road. What with short-windedness, stones, nits, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of rest and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the beautiful under these circumstances. The ordinary schoolboy is precisely in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him till he gets to the top. And nine times out of ten he does not get to the top."
The last example we shall take comes from a speech made after dinner at a much later period of his life. The occasion was a complimentary dinner to the editor of the English scientific periodical Nature, which had been for long the leading semi-popular journal of English science. Huxley, in proposing the health of the editor, declared that he did not quite know how to say what he wanted to say, but that he would explain by a story.
"A poor woman," he said, "was brought into one of our hospitals in a shockingly battered condition. When her wounds had been cleaned and sewn, and when the care of the surgeons had restored her to comparative comfort, someone said to her, 'I am afraid your husband has been knocking you about.' 'What!' she said, 'my Jim bash me? no it worn't by him; he's always been more like a friend to me than a husband.' That," went on Huxley, "is what I wish to say about our guest of to-night. In all our intercourse with him he has been more like a friend to us than an editor."
It is impossible to make a real distinction between the essays and the addresses of Huxley. Many of the most important of his addresses, as for instance his Romanes lecture on "Evolution and Ethics," were written and printed before he delivered them; most of them were carefully prepared, and revised and printed after delivery. It is therefore not remarkable to find a close resemblance in matter and manner between what was originally spoken and what was published without a vivâ voce delivery. Everything that may be said of the one set applies with an equal fitness to the other set. There are many who assert with confidence that Huxley is one of the great masters of English, and although an examination of this opinion involves discussion of the elusive quality termed "style," it is necessary to attempt it.
In that totality which consists of an essay or of a printed address, and of which we are, most of us, ready to discuss the style, there are at least three separable elements, each contributing after its kind to the effect on our minds. When the general effect is to throw us into a state of pleasure, it is our habit to qualify the style with an adjective of praise, selecting the adjective according to the degree of restraint or of enthusiasm with which we are accustomed to express our emotions; when the general effect is to throw us into a condition of boredom or of distaste, we make a corresponding choice of appropriate adjectives. When we wish to be specially critical we pass a little way beyond an empirical judgment by pleasure or annoyance and take into account the degree of harmony between matter and manner. In such a frame of mind we discount the pleasure obtained from verbal quips, if these occur in a grave exposition, or that received from solemn and stately harmonies of language if these be employed on insignificant trifles. In a condition of unusual critical exaltation we may even admit an excellence of language and phrasing though these have as their contents ideas which we dislike, or press towards conclusions from which we dissent. But if we desire to make an exact appreciation of literary style, it is requisite to examine separately the three elements which contribute to the effect produced on us by any written work. These three elements are the words or raw materials employed, the building of words into sentences and of sentences into paragraphs, which may be designated as the architectural work, and, finally, the ideas conveyed, that is to say, the actual object of the writing.
Huxley was a wide and omnivorous reader, and so had an unusually large fund of words at his disposal. His writings abound with quotations and allusions taken from the best English authors, and he had a profound and practical belief in the advantage to be gained from the reading of English. "If a man," he wrote, "cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers—I say, if he cannot get it out of these writers, he cannot get it out of anything." He had at least a fair knowledge of Greek in the original, and a very wide acquaintance with Greek phrasing and Greek ideas derived from a study of Greek authors in English versions. He had an unusual knowledge of Latin, both of the classical writers and of the early Church fathers and mediæval writers on science and metaphysics. French and German, the two foreign languages which are a necessary part of the mental equipment of an English-speaking man of science, were familiar to him. Finally, he had of necessity the wide and varied vocabulary of the natural and technical sciences at his disposal. From these varied sources, Huxley had a fund of words, a store of the raw material for expressing ideas, very much greater and more varied than that in the possession of most writers. You will find in his writings abundant and omnipresent evidence of the enormous wealth of verbal material ready for the ideas he wished to set forth: a Greek phrase, a German phrase, a Latin or French phrase, or a group of words borrowed from one of our own great writers always seemed to await his wish. General Booth's scheme for elevating the masses by cymbals and dogma was "corybantic Christianity"; to explain what he thought was the Catholic attitude to the doctrine of evolution, he said it would have been called damnabilis by Father Suarez, and that he would have meant "not that it was to be damned, but that it was an active principle capable of damning." Huxley was like a builder who did not limit himself while he was constructing a house to the ordinary materials from the most convenient local quarry, but who collected endlessly from all the quarries and brickfields of the world, and brought to his heaps curiously wrought stones taken from a thousand old buildings. The swift choice from such a varied material gave an ease and appearance of natural growth to his work; it produced many surprising and delightful combinations, and it never sacrificed convenience of expression to exigencies of the materials for expression. On the other hand, Huxley lacked the sedulous concern for words themselves as things valuable and delightful; the delight of the craftsman in his tools; the dainty and respectful tribute paid to the words themselves; in fine, he took little pleasure in words themselves and used them as counters rather than as coins. Careful reflection and examination will make it plain that the pleasure to be got from Huxley's style is not due in any large measure to his choice and handling of words. There is no evidence that he deliberately and fastidiously preferred one word to another, that he took delight in the savour of individual words, in the placing of plain words in a context to make them sparkle, in the avoidance of some, in the deliberate preference of other words,—in fact, in all the conscious tricks and graces that distinguish the lover of words from their mere user.
A close examination discovers a similar absence from Huxley's work of the second contributory to the total effect produced by written words. Anything that may be said about absence of artistry in the use of words, may be said as to absence of artistry in building of the words into sentences, of the sentences into paragraphs and pages. In the first place, actual infelicities of sentence-building are frequent. Clause is piled on clause, qualifying phrases are interpolated, the easy devices of dashes and repetitions are employed wherever convenience suggests them. It is striking to find how infrequent is the occurrence of passages marked in any way by sonorous rhythm or by the charm of a measured proportion. The purple passages themselves, those which linger in the memory and to which the reader turns back, linger by their sense and not by their sound. For indeed the truth of the matter is that Huxley's style was a style of ideas and not of words and sentences. The more closely you analyse his pages the more certainly you find that the secret of the effect produced on you lies in the gradual development of the precise and logical ideas he wished to convey, in the brilliant accumulation of argument upon argument, in the logical subordination of details to the whole, in fact, in the arts of the convinced, positive, and logical thinker, who knew exactly what he meant you to know and who set about telling you it with the least possible concern for the words he used or for the sentences into which he formed his words. The ideas and their ordering are the root and the branches, the beginning and the end of his style. To put it in another way: it would be extremely easy to translate any of Huxley's writings into French or German, and they would lose extremely little of the personal flavour of their author. The present writer has just been reading French translations of Huxley's Physiography and Crayfish, made at different times by different translators. At first reading it seems almost miraculous how identically the effect produced by the original is reproduced by the French rendering, but the secret is really no secret at all. Huxley produced his effects by the ordering of his ideas and not by the ordering of his words. From the technical point of view of literary craftsmanship, he cannot be assigned a high place; he is one of our great English writers, but he is not a great writer of English.
