Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

by Thomas Henry Huxley

You may fancy whether my life is a very happy one thus spent without even the satisfaction of the sense of right-doing. I must come to some resolution about it, and that shortly. I was talking seriously with Fanning the other night about the possibility of finding some employment of a profitable kind in Australia, storekeeping, squatting, or the like. As I told him, any change in my mode of life must be TOTAL. If I am to change at all, the change must be total and complete. I will not attempt my own profession. I should only be led astray to think and to work as of old, and sigh continually for my old dear and intoxicating pursuits. I wish I understood Brewing, and I would make a proposition to come and help your father. You may smile, but I am as serious as ever I was in my life.

[The distance between them made it doubly difficult to keep in touch with one another, when the post took from four and a half to five or even six months to reach England from Australia. The answer to a letter would come when the matter in question was long done with. The assurance that he was doing right at one moment seemed inadequate when circumstances had altered and hope sunk lower. It was all too easy to suspect that she did not understand his aims, his thirst for action, nor the fact that he was no longer free to do as he liked, whether to stay in the navy, to go into practice, or follow his own pursuits and pleasure. Yet it made him despair to be so hedged in by circumstances. With all his efforts, he seemed as though he had done nothing but earn the reputation of being a very promising young man. How much easier to continue the struggle if he could but have seen her face to face, and read her thoughts as to whether he were right or wrong in the course he was pursuing. He appeals to her faith that he is choosing the nobler path in pursuing knowledge, than in turning aside to the temptation of throwing it up for the sake of their speedier union. Still she was right in claiming a share in his work; but for her his life would have been wasted.

The clouds gathered very thickly about him when in April 1852 his mother died, while his father was hopelessly ill.] "Belief and happiness," [he writes,] "seem to be beyond the reach of thinking men in these days, but courage and silence are left." [Again the clouds lifted, for in October he received Miss Heathorn's] "noble and self-sacrificing letter, which has given me more comfort than anything for a long while," [the keynote of which was that a man should pursue those things for which he is most fitted, let them be what they will. He now felt free to tell the vicissitudes of thought and will he had passed through this twelvemonth, and how the idea of giving up all had affected him.] "The spectre of a wasted life has passed before me—a vision of that servant who hid his talent in a napkin and buried it."

[Early in 1853 he writes how much he was cheered by his sister's advice and encouragement to persist in the struggle; but the darkest moment was still to come. His hopes from his candidature crumbled away one after the other; his leave from the Admiralty was coming to an end, and there was small hope of renewing it; the grant from Government remained as unattainable as ever; the long struggle had taught him the full extent of his powers only, it seemed, to end by denying him all opportunity for their use.]

And so the card house I have been so laboriously building up these two years with all manner of hard struggling will be tumbled down again, and my small light will be ignominiously snuffed out like that of better men…I can submit if the fates are too strong. The world is no better than an arena of gladiators, and I, a stray savage, have been turned into it to fight my way with my rude club among the steel-clad fighters. Well, I have won my way into the front rank, and ought to be thankful and deem it only the natural order of things if I can get no further.

[And again in a letter of July 6, 1853:—]

I know that these three years have inconceivably altered me—that from being an idle man, only too happy to flow into the humours of the moment, I have become almost unable to exist without active intellectual excitement. I know that in this I find peace and rest such as I can attain in no other way. From being a mere untried fledgling, doubtful whether the wish to fly proceeded from mere presumption or from budding wings, I have now some confidence in well-tried pinions, which have given me rank among the strongest and foremost. I have always felt how difficult it was for you to realise all this—how strange it must be to you that though your image remained as bright as ever, new interests and purposes had ranged themselves around it, and though they could claim no pre-eminence, yet demanded their share of my thoughts. I make no apology for this—it is man's nature and the necessary influence of circumstances which will so have it; and depend, however painful our present separation may be, the spectacle of a man who had given up the cherished purpose of his life, the Esau who had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage and with it his self-respect, would before long years were over our heads be infinitely more painful. Depend upon it, the trust which you placed in my hands when I left you—to choose for both of us—has not been abused. Hemmed in by all sorts of difficulties, my choice was a narrow one, and I was guided more by circumstances than my own free will. Nevertheless the path has shown itself to be a fair one, neither more difficult nor less so than most paths in life in which a man of energy may hope to do much if he believes in himself, and is at peace within.

My course in life is taken. I will NOT leave London—I WILL make myself a name and a position as well as an income by some kind of pursuit connected with science, which is the thing for which nature has fitted me if she has ever fitted any one for anything. Bethink yourself whether you can cast aside all repining and all doubt, and devote yourself in patience and trust to helping me along my path as no one else could. I know what I ask, and the sacrifice I demand, and if this were the time to use false modesty, I should say how little I have to offer in return…

I am full of faults, but I am real and true, and the whole devotion of an earnest soul cannot be overprized.

…It is as if all that old life at Holmwood had merely been a preparation for the real life of our love—as if we were then children ignorant of life's real purpose—as if these last months had merely been my old doubts over again, whether I had rightly or wrongly interpreted the manner and the words that had given me hope…