Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 2

by Thomas Henry Huxley

Lexden Park, Colchester, 4th November, 1898.

Dear Mr. Huxley,

I have met men who seemed to me to possess powers of mind even greater than those of your father—his friend Henry Smith for example; but I never met any one who gave me the impression so much as he did, that he would have gone to the front in any pursuit in which he had seen fit to engage. Henry Smith had, in addition to his astonishing mathematical genius, and his great talents as a scholar, a rare faculty of persuasiveness. Your father used to speak with much admiration and some amusement of the way in which he managed to get people to take his view by appearing to take theirs; but he never could have been a power in a popular assembly, nor have carried with him by the force of his eloquence, great masses of men. I do not think that your father, if he had entered the House of Commons and thrown himself entirely into political life, would have been much behind Gladstone as a debater, or Bright as an orator. Whether he had the stamina which are required not only to reach but to retain a foremost place in politics, is another question. The admirers of Prince Bismarck would say that the daily prayer of the statesman should be there "une bonne digestion et un mauvais coeur." "Le mauvais coeur" does not appear to be "de toute necessite," but, assuredly, the "bonne digestion" is. Given an adequate and equal amount of ability in two men who enter the House of Commons together, it is the man of strong digestion, drawing with it, as it usually does, good temper and power of continuous application, who will go furthest. Gladstone, who was inferior to your father in intellect, might have "given points" to the Dragon of Wantley who devoured church steeples. Your father could certainly not have done so, and in that respect was less well equipped for a lifelong parliamentary struggle.

I should like to have seen these two pitted against each other with that "substantial piece of furniture" between them behind which Mr. Disraeli was glad to shelter himself. I should like to have heard them discussing some subject which they both thoroughly understood. When they did cross swords the contest was like nothing that has happened in our times save the struggle at Omdurman. It was not so much a battle as a massacre, for Gladstone had nothing but a bundle of antiquated prejudices wherewith to encounter your father's luminous thought and exact knowledge.

You know, I daresay, that Mr. William Rathbone, then M.P. for Liverpool, once proposed to your father to be the companion of my first Indian journey in 1874-5, he, William Rathbone, paying all your father's expenses. (Of this, Dr. Tyndall wrote to Mrs. Huxley:—"I want to tell you a pleasant conversation I had last night with Jodrell. He and a couple more want to send Hal with Grant Duff to India, taking charge of his duties here and of all necessities ghostly and bodily there!") Mr. Rathbone made this proposal when he found that Lubbock, with whom I travelled a great deal at that period of my life, was unable to go with me to India. How I wish your father had said "Yes." My journey, as it was, turned out most instructive and delightful; but to have lived five months with a man of his extraordinary gifts would have been indeed a rare piece of good fortune, and I should have been able also to have contributed to the work upon which you are engaged a great many facts which would have been of interest to your readers. You will, however, I am sure, take the will for the deed, and believe me, very sincerely yours,

M.E. Grant Duff.]

CHAPTER 2.2.

1871.

["In 1871" (to quote Sir M. Foster), "the post of Secretary to the Royal Society became vacant through the resignation of William Sharpey, and the Fellows learned with glad surprise that Huxley, whom they looked to rather as a not distant President, was willing to undertake the duties of the office." This office, which he held until 1880, involved him for the next ten years in a quantity of anxious work, not only in the way of correspondence and administration, but the seeing through the press and often revising every biological paper that the Society received, as well as reading those it rejected. Then, too, he had to attend every general, council, and committee meeting, amongst which latter the "Challenger" Committee was a load in itself. Under pressure of all this work, he was compelled to give up active connection with other learned societies. (See Appendix 2.)

Other work this year, in addition to the School Board, included courses of lectures at the London Institution in January and February, on "First Principles of Biology," and from October to December on "Elementary Physiology"; lectures to Working Men in London from February to April, as well as one at Liverpool, March 25, on "The Geographical Distribution of Animals"; two lectures at the Royal Institution, May 12 and 19, on "Berkeley on Vision," and the "Metaphysics of Sensation" ("Collected Essays" 6). He published one paleontological paper, "Fossil Vertebrates from the Yarrow Colliery" (Huxley and Wright, "Irish Academy Transactions"). In June and July he gave 36 lectures to schoolmasters—that important business of teaching the teachers that they might set about scientific instruction in the right way. (See below.) He attended the British Association at Edinburgh, and laid down his Presidency; he brought out his "Manual of Vertebrate Anatomy," and wrote a review of "Mr. Darwin's Critics" (see below), while on October 9 he delivered an address at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, on "Administrative Nihilism" ("Collected Essays" 1). This address, written between September 21 and 28, and remodelled later, was a pendant to his educational campaign on the School Board; a restatement and justification of what he had said and done there. His text was the various objections raised to State interference with education; he dealt first with the upholders of a kind of caste system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise—neatly satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to help capacity to rise is "machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower." He repeats in new phrase his warning] "that every man of high natural ability, who is both ignorant and miserable, is as great a danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to people who fire it. Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow: and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck among friends and foes."