Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3

by Thomas Henry Huxley

As for his lectures and addresses to the public, they used to be thronged by crowds of attentive listeners.

Huxley's public addresses (writes Professor Osborn) always gave me the impression of being largely impromptu; but he once told me: "I always think out carefully every word I am going to say. There is no greater danger than the so-called INSPIRATION OF THE MOMENT, which leads you to say something which is not exactly true, or which you would regret afterwards."

Mr. G.W. Smalley has also left a striking description of him as a lecturer in the seventies and early eighties.

I used always to admire the simple and business-like way in which Huxley made his entry on great occasions. He hated anything like display, and would have none of it. At the Royal Institution, more than almost anywhere else, the lecturer, on whom the concentric circles of spectators in their steep amphitheatre look down, focuses the gaze. Huxley never seemed aware that anybody was looking at him. From self-consciousness he was, here as elsewhere, singularly free, as from self-assertion. He walked in through the door on the left, as if he were entering his own laboratory. In these days he bore scarcely a mark of age. He was in the full vigour of manhood and looked the man he was. Faultlessly dressed—the rule in the Royal Institution is evening costume—with a firm step and easy bearing, he took his place apparently without a thought of the people who were cheering him. To him it was an anniversary. He looked, and he probably was, the master. Surrounded as he was by the celebrities of science and the ornaments of London drawing-rooms, there was none who had quite the same kind of intellectual ascendancy which belonged to him. The square forehead, the square jaw, the tense lines of the mouth, the deep flashing dark eyes, the impression of something more than strength he gave you, an impression of sincerity, of solid force, of immovability, yet with the gentleness arising from the serene consciousness of his strength—all this belonged to Huxley and to him alone. The first glance magnetised his audience. The eyes were those of one accustomed to command, of one having authority, and not fearing on occasion to use it. The hair swept carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew rather long behind, yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine in everything—look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art, he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in oratory or whatever else—he had simplicity. The force was in the thought and the diction, and he needed no other. The voice was rather deep, low, but quite audible, at times sonorous, and always full. He used the chest-notes. His manner here, in the presence of this select and rather limited audience—for the theatre of the Royal Institution holds, I think, less than a thousand people—was exactly the same as before a great company whom he addressed at [Liverpool], as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. I remember going late to that, and having to sit far back, yet hearing every word easily; and there too the feeling was the same, that he had mastered his audience, taken possession of them, and held them to the end in an unrelaxing grip, as a great actor at his best does. There was nothing of the actor about him, except that he knew how to stand still, but masterful he ever was.

Up to the time of his last illness, he regularly breakfasted at eight, and avoided, as far as possible, going out to that meal, a "detestable habit" as he called it, which put him off for the whole day. He left the house about nine, and from that time till midnight at earliest was incessantly busy. His regular lectures involved an immensity of labour, for he would never make a statement in them which he had not personally verified by experiment. In the Jermyn Street days he habitually made preparations to illustrate the points on which he was lecturing, for his students had no laboratory in which to work out the things for themselves. His lectures to working-men also involved as much careful preparation as the more conspicuous discourses at the Royal Institution.

This thoroughness of preparation had no less effect on the teacher than on the taught. He writes to an old pupil:—]

It is pleasant when the "bread cast upon the water" returns after many days; and if the crumbs given in my lectures have had anything to do with the success on which I congratulate you, I am very glad.

I used to say of my own lectures that if nobody else learned anything from them, I did; because I always took a great deal of pains over them. But it is none the less satisfactory to find that there WERE other learners.

[As for the ordinary course of a day's work, the more fitful energy and useless mornings of the earliest period in London were soon left behind. He was never one of those portentously early risers who do a fair day's work before other people are up; there was only one period, about 1873, when he had to be specially careful of his health, and, under Sir Andrew Clark's regime, took riding exercise for an hour each day before starting for South Kensington, that he records the fact of doing any work before breakfast, and that was letter-writing.

Much of the day during the session, and still more when his lectures were over, would thus be spent in original research, or in the examination and description of fossils in his official duty as Paleontologist to the Survey. As often as not, there would be a sitting of some Royal Commission to attend; committees of some learned society; meetings or dinners in the evening; if not, there would be an article to write or proofs to correct. Indeed, the greater part of the work by which the world knows him best was done after dinner, and after a long day's work in the lecture-room and laboratory.