Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 1

by Thomas Henry Huxley

And now…shall I be very naughty and make a confession? The thing that a fortnight ago (before I got it) I thought so much of, I give you my word I do not care a pin for. I am sick of it and ashamed of having thought so much of it, and the congratulations I get give me a sort of internal sardonic grin. I think this has come about partly because I did not get the official confirmation of what I had heard for some days, and with my habit of facing the ill side of things I came to the conclusion that Weld had made a mistake, and I went in thought through the whole enormous mortification of having to explain to those to whom I had mentioned it that it was quite a mistake. I found that all this, when I came to look at it, was by no means so dreadful as it seemed—quite bearable in short—and then I laughed at myself and have cared nothing about the whole concern ever since. In truth…I do not think that I am in the proper sense of the word ambitious. I have an enormous longing after the highest and best in all shapes—a longing which haunts me and is the demon which ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing his behests. The honours of men I value so far as they are evidences of power, but with the cynical mistrust of their judgment and my own worthiness, which always haunts me, I put very little faith in them. Their praise makes me sneer inwardly. God forgive me if I do them any great wrong.

…I feel and know that all the rewards and honours in the world will ever be worthless for me as soon as they are obtained. I know that always, as now, they will make me more sad than joyful. I know that nothing that could be done would give me the pure and heartfelt joy and peace of mind that your love has given me, and, please God, shall give for many a long year to come, and yet my demon says work! work! you shall not even love unless you work.

Not blinded by any vanity, then, I hope…but viewing this stroke of fortune as respects its public estimation only, I think I must look upon the award of this medal as the turning-point of my life, as the finger-post teaching me as clearly as anything can what is the true career that lies open before me. For whatever may be my own private estimation of it, there can be no doubt as to the general feeling about this thing, and in case of my candidature for any office it would have the very greatest weight. And as you will have seen by my last letter, it only strengthens and confirms the conclusion I had come to. Bid me God-speed then…it is all I want to labour cheerfully.

November 28.

…You will hear all the details of the Great Duke's state funeral from the papers much better than I can tell you them. I went to the Cathedral [St Paul's] and had the good fortune to get a capital seat—in front, close to the great door by which every one entered. It was bitter cold, a keen November wind blowing right in, and as I was there from eight till three, I expected nothing less than rheumatic fever the next day; however I didn't get it. It was pitiful to see the poor old Marquis of Anglesey—a year older than the Duke—standing with bare head in the keen wind close to me for more than three quarters of an hour. It was impressive enough—the great interior lighted by a single line of light running along the whole circuit of the cornice, and another encircling the dome, and casting a curious illumination over the masses of uniforms which filled the great space. The best of our people were there and passed close to me, but the only face that made any great impression upon my memory was that of Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde. Fancy a very large, broad-winged, and fierce-looking hawk in uniform. Such an eye!

When the coffin and the mourners had passed I closed up with the soldiers and went up under the dome, where I heard the magnificent service in full perfection.

All of it, however, was but stage trickery compared with the noble simplicity of the old man's life. How the old stoic, used to his iron bed and hard hair pillow, would have smiled at all the pomp—submitting to that, however, and all other things necessary to the "carrying on of the Queen's Government."

I send Tennyson's ode by way of packing—it is not worth much more, the only decent passages to my mind being those I have marked.

The day after to-morrow I go to have my medal presented and to dine and make a speech.

[The Royal Medal was conferred on November 30, and the medallists were entertained at the anniversary dinner of the Society on that day. In the words with which the President, the Earl of Rosse, accompanied the presentation of the medal, "it is not difficult," writes Sir M. Foster, "reading between the lines, to recognise the appreciation of a new spirit of anatomical inquiry, not wholly free from a timorous apprehension as to its complete validity." ("In these papers (on the Medusae) you have for the first time fully developed their structure, and laid the foundation of a rational theory for their classification." "In your second paper 'On the Anatomy of Salpa and Pyrosoma,' the phenomena, etc., have received the most ingenious and elaborate elucidation, and have given rise to a process of reasoning, the results of which can scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a very important degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what may be called transcendental physiology." See "Royal Society" Obituary Notices volume 59 page 1.) For the difference between this and the labours of the greatest English comparative anatomist of the time, whose detailed work was of the highest value, but whose generalisations and speculations, based on the philosophy of Oken, proved barren and fruitless, lay in the fact that Huxley, led to it doubtless by his solitary readings in his Charing Cross days, had taken up the method of Von Baer and Johannes Muller, then almost unknown, or at least unused in England—"the method which led the anatomist to face his problems in the spirit in which the physicist faced his."