Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3

by Thomas Henry Huxley

He possessed a wonderful faculty for tearing out the heart of a book, reading it through at a gallop, but knowing what it said on all the points that interested him. Of verbal memory he had very little; in spite of all his reading I do not believe he knew half a dozen consecutive lines of poetry by heart. What he did know was the substance of what an author had written; how it fitted into his own scheme of knowledge; and where to find any point again when he wished to cite it.

In his biological studies his immense knowledge was firmly fixed in his mind by practical investigation; as is said above, he would take at second hand nothing for which he vouched in his teaching, and was always ready to repeat for himself the experiments of others, which determined questions of interest to him. The citations, analyses, maps, with which he frequently accompanied his reading, were all part of the same method of acquiring facts and setting them in order within his mind. So careful, indeed, was he in giving nothing at second hand, that one of his scientific friends reproached him with wasting his time upon unnecessary scientific work, to which competent investigators had already given the stamp of their authority. "Poor—," was his comment afterwards, "if that is his own practice, his work will never live." On the literary side, he was omnivorous—consuming everything, as Mr. Spencer put it, from fairy tales to the last volume on metaphysics.

Unlike Darwin, to whom scientific research was at length the only thing engrossing enough to make him oblivious of his never-ending ill-health, to the gradual exclusion of other interests, literary and artistic, Huxley never lost his delight in literature or in art. He had a keen eye for a picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtsman's and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour. To good music he was always susceptible. (To one breaking in upon him at certain afternoon hours in his room at South Kensington, "a whiff of the pipe" (writes Professor Howes), "and a snatch of some choice melody or a Bach's fugue, were the not infrequent welcome.") He played no instrument; as a young man, however, he used to sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. But he had small leisure to devote to art. On his holidays he would sometimes sketch with a firm and rapid touch. His illustrations to the "Cruise of the Rattlesnake" show what his untrained capacities were. But to go to a concert or opera was rare after middle life; to go to the theatre rarer still, much as he appreciated a good play. His time was too deeply mortgaged; and in later life, the deafness which grew upon him added a new difficulty.

In poetry he was sensitive both to matter and form. One school of modern poetry he dismissed as "sensuous caterwauling": a busy man, time and patience failed him to wade through the trivial discursiveness of so much of Wordsworth's verse; thus unfortunately he never realised the full value of a poet in whom the mass of ore bears so large a proportion to the pure metal. Shelley was too diffuse to be among his first favourites; but for simple beauty, Keats; for that, and for the comprehension of the meaning of modern science, Tennyson; for strength and feeling, Browning as represented by his earlier poems—these were the favourites among the moderns. He knew his eighteenth-century classics, but knew better his Milton and his Shakespeare, to whom he turned with ever-increasing satisfaction, as men do who have lived a full life.

His early acquaintance with German had given him a lasting admiration of the greatest representatives of German literature, Goethe above all, in whose writings he found a moral grandeur to be ranked with that of the Hebrew prophets. Eager to read Dante in the original, he spent much of his leisure on board the "Rattlesnake" in making out the Italian with the aid of a dictionary, and in this way came to know the beauties of the "Divina Commedia". On the other hand, it was a scientific interest which led him in later life to take up his Greek, though one use he put it to was to read Homer in the original.

Though he was a great novel-reader, and, as he grew older, would always have a novel ready to take up for a while in the evening, his chief reading, in German and French as well as English, was philosophy and history.

His recreations were, as a rule, literary, and consisted in a change of mental occupation. The only times I can remember his playing an outdoor game are in the late sixties, when he started his elder children at cricket on the common at Littlehampton, and in 1871 when he played golf at St. Andrews. When first married, he promised his wife to reserve Saturday afternoons for recreation, and constantly went with her to the Ella concerts. About 1861 she urged him to take exercise by joining Mr. Herbert Spencer at racquets; but the pressure of work before long absorbed all his time. In his youth he was extremely fond of chess, and played eagerly with his fellow-students at Charing Cross Hospital or with his messmates on board the "Rattlesnake". But after he taught me the game, somewhere about 1869 or 1870, I do not think he ever found time for it again.

His principal exercise was walking during the holidays. In his earlier days especially, when overwrought by the stress of his life in London, he used to go off with a friend for a week's walking tour in Wales or the Lakes, in Brittany or the Eifel country, or in summer for a longer trip to Switzerland. In this way he "burnt up the waste products," as he would say, of his town life, and came back fresh for a new spell of unintermittent work.

But on the whole, the amount of exercise he took was insufficient for his bodily needs. Even the riding prescribed for him when he first broke down, became irksome, and was not continued very long, although his bodily machine was such as could only be kept in perfect working order by more exercise than he would give. His physique was not adapted to burn up the waste without special stimulus. I remember once, as he and I were walking up Beachy Head, we passed a man with a splendid big chest. "Ah," said my father regretfully, "if I had only had a chest like that, what a lot of work I could have done."

When, in 1872, he built his new house in Marlborough Place, my father bargained for two points; one, that each member of the family should have a corner of his or her own, where, as he used to say, it would be possible to "consume their own smoke"; the other, that the common living-rooms should be of ample size. Thus from 1874 onwards he was enabled to see something of his many friends who would come as far as St. John's Wood on a Sunday evening. No formal invitation for a special day was needed. The guests came, before supper or after, sometimes more, sometimes fewer, as on any ordinary at-home day. There was a simple informal meal at 6.30 or 7 o'clock, which called itself by no more dignified name than high tea—was, in fact, a cold supper with varying possibilities in the direction of dinner or tea. It was a chance medley of old and young—friends of the parents and friends of the children, but all ultimately centring round the host himself, whose end of the table never flagged for conversation, grave or gay.