[The end of the correspondence was quite amicable. Dr. Abbott explained that he had taken his facts from the recently published "Autobiography," and that the reporters had wonderfully altered what he really said by large omissions. In a second letter ("Times" October 11) Huxley says:—]
I am much obliged to Dr. Abbott for his courteous explanation. I myself have suffered so many things at the hands of so many reporters—of whom it may too often be said that their "faith, unfaithful, makes them falsely true"—that I can fully enter into what his feelings must have been when he contemplated the picture of his discourse, in which the lights on "raw midshipmen," "pessimist out and out," "devil take the hindmost," and "Heine's dragoon," were so high, while the "good things" he was kind enough to say about me lay in the deep shadow of the invisible. And I can assure Dr. Abbott that I should not have dreamed of noticing the report of his interesting lecture, which I read when it appeared, had it not been made the subject of the leading article which drew the attention of all the world to it on the following day.
I was well aware that Dr. Abbott must have founded his remarks on the brief notice of my life which (without my knowledge) has been thrust into its present ridiculous position among biographies of eminent musicians; and most undoubtedly anything I have said there is public property. But erroneous suppositions imaginatively connected with what I have said appear to me to stand upon a different footing, especially when they are interspersed with remarks injurious to my early friends. Some of the "raw midshipmen and unlearned naval officers" of whom Dr. Abbott speaks, in terms which he certainly did not find in my "autobiography," are, I am glad to say, still alive, and are performing, or have performed, valuable services to their country. I wonder what Dr. Abbott would think, and perhaps say, if his youthful University friends were spoken of as "raw curates and unlearned country squires."
When David Hume's housemaid was wroth because somebody chalked up "St David's" on his house, the philosopher is said to have remarked,—" Never mind, lassie, better men than I have been made saints of before now." And, perhaps, if I had recollected that "better men than I have been made texts of before now," a slight flavour of wrath which may be perceptible would have vanished from my first letter. If Dr. Abbott has found any phrase of mine too strong, I beg him to set it against "out and out pessimist" and "Heine's dragoon," and let us cry quits. He is the last person with whom I should wish to quarrel.
[Two interesting criticisms of books follow; one "The First Three
Gospels", by the Reverend Estlin Carpenter; the other on "Use and
Disuse", directed against the doctrine of use-inheritance, by Mr. Platt
Ball, who not only sent the book but appealed to him for advice as to
his future course in undertaking a larger work on the evolution of man.]
Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, October 11, 1890.
My dear Mr. Carpenter,
Accept my best thanks for "The First Three Gospels", which strikes me as an admirable exposition of the case, full, clear, and calm. Indeed the latter quality gives it here and there a touch of humour. You say the most damaging things in a way so gentle that the orthodox reader must feel like the eels who were skinned by the fair Molly—lost between pain and admiration.
I am certainly glad to see that the book has reached a second edition; it will do yeoman's service to the cause of right reason.
A friend of mine was in the habit of sending me his proofs, and I sometimes wrote on them "no objection except to the whole"; and I am afraid that you will think what I am about to say comes to pretty much the same thing—at least if I am right in the supposition that a passage in your first preface (page 7) states your fundamental position, and that you conceive that when criticism has done its uttermost there still remains evidence that the personality of Jesus was the leading cause—the conditio sine qua non—of the evolution of Christianity from Judaism.