Chapter 7

Of all the men I have ever known, his ideas and his standard were, on the whole, the highest. He recognized that the fact of his religious views imposed on him the duty of living the most upright of lives; and I am very much of the opinion of a little child, now grown into an accomplished woman, who, when she was told that Professor Huxley had no hope of future rewards and no fear of future punishments, emphatically declared: "Then I think Professor Huxley is the best man I have ever known."

XIII

MORALITY AND THE CHURCH

It is alike interesting and satisfactory to reflect that practical morality in civilized life is much the same for all earnest men, however they differ in their theories as to the origin of moral ideas and the kind of motives and sanctions to be insisted on for right action. It is true that the theologians and supernaturalists have erected their scaffolding around the building of social and human morality, vowing that it will not stand without. Yet it remains steady when the scaffolding is warped by the winds of doctrine or uprooted by advancing knowledge. The spirit that has built it is free from the perverted enthusiasms which crusade against freedom, put thought in fetters, and sanctify persecution. It lends no support to the other spirit that would dominate minds and consciences by formulæ that lie outside the court of reason. These things are of clericalism, and it was clericalism to which Huxley ever found himself in opposition, for it "raises obstacles to scientific ways of thinking, which are even more important than scientific discoveries." But all associations for promoting that sympathy which is at the foundation of human society need not be infected with clericalism. If such a step were otherwise expedient, even the State might do something towards that end indirectly:--

I can conceive the existence of an Established Church which should be a blessing to the community. A Church in which, week by week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract propositions in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an ideal of true, just, and pure living; a place in which those who are weary of the burden of daily cares should find a moment's rest in the contemplation of the higher life which is possible for all, though attained by so few; a place in which the man of strife and of business should have time to think how small, after all, are the rewards he covets compared with peace and charity. Depend upon it, if such a Church existed, no one would seek to disestablish it.

But, while sympathy is the basis of society and enthusiasm the greatest motive power of humanity, there remains something more to be considered. The man who could appreciate the value of the personal consolations brought by the Bible-woman to the poor and down-trodden, and the infinitely comfortable assurance of the mystic, firm as hypnotic conviction, that he is the direct associate and instrument of the Almighty, whether submissive or arrogant, from Stephen to the Bâb, from Cromwell and Gordon to Bismarck and his Imperial associates, such a man might well say: "I wish I could be so magnificently self-confident, so untroubled by doubt. But I can't, for I have to ask: Is it true?; and I find that these persons base themselves upon very questionable grounds."

True, that in regard to the place of good and evil in this world the best theological teachers--

substantially recognize these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the "liberal" popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible for their failure to remain so; that it is given to everybody to reach the ethical ideal if he will only try; that all partial evil is universal good, and other optimistic figments, such as that which represents "Providence" under the guise of a paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that everything will come right (according to our notions) at last.

...I am a very strong believer in the punishment of certain kinds of actions, not only in the present, but in all the future a man can have, be it long or short. Therefore in hell, for I suppose that all men with a clear sense of right and wrong (and I am not sure that any others deserve such punishment) have now and then "descended into hell" and stopped there quite long enough to know what infinite punishment means. And if a genuine, not merely subjective, immortality awaits us, I conceive that, without some such change as that depicted in the fifteenth chapter of _Corinthians_, immortality must be eternal misery. The fate of Swift's Struldbrugs seems to me not more horrible than that of a mind imprisoned for ever within the _flammantia moenia_ of inextinguishable memories.

Such were the shapes into which the Christian theologians had fashioned a number of moral truths when they annexed the house of human morality. But what is the basis of certitude on which these interpretations rest? If Adam was not an historical character, if the story of the Fall be whittled down into a "type" which is typical of no underlying reality, the basis of Pauline theology is shaken, and practical deductions drawn from it are shaken also. In fact, "the Demonology of Christianity shows that its founders knew no more about the spiritual world than anybody else, and Newman's doctrine of 'Development' is true to an extent of which the Cardinal did not dream." And as to the argument that the successful spread of Christianity attests the truth of the New Testament story, he replied to his questioner with the general propositions:--

1. The Church founded by Jesus has _not_ made its way; has _not_ permeated the world; but _did_ become extinct in the country of its birth--as Nazarenism and Ebionism.

2. The Church that did make its way and coalesced with the State in the fourth century had no more to do with the Church founded by Jesus than Ultramontanism has with Quakerism. It is Alexandrian Judaism and Neoplatonistic mystagogy, and as much of the old idolatry and demonology as could be got in under new or old names.

3. Paul has said that the Law was schoolmaster to Christ with more truth than he knew. Throughout the Empire the synagogues had their cloud of Gentile hangers-on--those who "feared God" and who were fully prepared to accept a Christianity which was merely an expurgated Judaism and the belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

4. The Christian "Sodalitia" were not merely religious bodies, but friendly societies, burial societies, and guilds. They hung together for all purposes; the mob hated them as it now hates the Jews in Eastern Europe, because they were more frugal, more industrious, and led better lives than their neighbours, while they stuck together like Scotchmen.

If these things are true--and I appeal to your knowledge of history that they are so--what has the success of Christianity to do with the truth or falsehood of the story of Jesus?

Furthermore, behind all the theological developments of the Church lies the whole question of Theism, and "the philosophical difficulties of Theism now are neither greater nor less than they have been ever since Theism was invented."

XIV

LIFE AND FRIENDSHIPS

"To live laborious days" was, for Huxley, at all times a necessity as well as a creed. The lover of knowledge and truth, he firmly believed, must devote his uttermost powers to their service; he held as strongly that every man's first duty to society was to support himself. But science provided more fame than pence, and with wife and family to support he was spurred to redoubled efforts. In the early years of married life especially, while he was still struggling to make his way, he often felt the pinch. He added to his modest income by reviewing and translating scientific books and by lecturing. On one occasion, when he was a candidate for a certain scientific lectureship, one of the committee of election, a wealthy man, expressed astonishment at his application--"what can he want with a hundred a year?" "I dare say," commented Huxley, "he pays his cook that." In early days, visioning the future, he and his wife had fondly planned to marry on £400 a year, while he pursued science, unknown if need be, for the sake of science. The reality pressed hardly upon them; those were dark evenings when he would come home fagged out by a second lecture at the end of a full day's work and lay himself down wearily on one couch, while she, so long a semi-invalid, lay uselessly on another. And, later, the upbringing of a large family, though its advent made life the more worth living, involved a heavy strain. At the same time, a man who was ever ready to take up responsibilities for the furtherance of every branch of science with which he was concerned had endless responsibilities committed to him. Besides his researches in pure science, whether anatomy, paleontology, or anthropology, his regular teaching work and other courses of lectures, his long work as examiner at the London University, the production of scientific memoirs and text-books and more general essays, he took a leading share in editing the _Natural History Review_ for two and a-half years; he was an active supporter of the chief scientific societies to which he belonged, and took a prominent part in their administration as member of council, secretary, or president, the most laborious period of which was during the nine years of his secretaryship of the Royal Society, soon to be followed by the presidency. Add to these his service on the School Board and no less than eight Royal Commissions, and it is easy to see that the longest working days he could contrive were always filled and over-filled.

When very tired he would occasionally dash off for a week or two's walking with a friend in Wales, or some corner of France; two summer holidays in Switzerland with John Tyndall resulted in a joint paper on the "Structure of Glacier Ice"; later, the family holidays by the sea regularly saw a good deal of time devoted to writing, while his exercise consisted of long walks.

Unlike Darwin, who at last found nothing save science engrossing enough to make him oblivious of his constant ill-health, Huxley never lost his keen delight in literature and art. He was a rapid and omnivorous reader, devouring everything from a fairy tale to a blue book, and tearing the heart out of a book at express speed. With this went a love of great and beautiful poetry and of prose expression that is at once exact and artistically balanced. "I have a great love and respect for my native tongue," he wrote, "and take great pains to use it properly. Sometimes I write essays half-a-dozen times before I can get them into the proper shape; and I believe I become more fastidious as I grow older." Indeed, even after much re-writing, his corrections in proof must have appalled his publishers. "Science and literature," he declared, "are not two things, but two sides of one thing." "Have something to say, and say it," was the great Duke's theory of style. "Say it in such language," added Huxley, "that you can stand cross-examination on every word. Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact some time and get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly to use language which will give a loophole of escape either way, there is no hope for you."

Herein lay the secret of his lucidity. Uniting the scientific habit of mind with the literary art, he showed that truthfulness need not be bald, and that power lies rather in accuracy than in luxuriance of diction. As to the influence which such a style exerted on the habit of mind of his readers, there is remarkable testimony in a letter from Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the _Life of Huxley_, ii, 239. Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have produced the same effect upon him.

Huxley's own criticism of the one and only poem be ever published is also instructive. On his way back from the funeral of Tennyson in Westminster Abbey, he spent the journey in shaping out some lines on the dead poet, the germ of which had come into his mind in the Abbey. These, with a number of other tributes to Tennyson by professed poets, were printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ for November, 1892. He writes in a private letter:--

If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the others, I should say that as to style it is hammered, and as to feeling, human.

They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience would have boggled over.

As regards the arts other than literary, he had a keen eye for a picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtman's and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour. To good music, also, he was always susceptible; as a young man he used to sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. In music, as in painting, he was untrained. Yet, as has been noted already, his illustrations to MacGillivray's _Voyage of the Rattlesnake_ and his holiday sketches suggest that he might have gone far had he been trained as an artist.

When first married he used to set aside Saturday afternoons to take his wife to the Ella concerts, fore-runners of the "Saturday Pops.," but it was not very long before the pressure of circumstance forbade this pleasure. Later, he very occasionally managed to go to the theatre; but his chief recreation, apart from change of work and the rapid devouring of a good novel, was in meeting his friends, when occasion offered, at the scientific societies or at dinner, or now and then in country visits which had not yet received the name of "week-ends."

When, in the middle seventies, his position was firmly established and he was living in a roomy house, No. 4 Marlborough Place, St. John's Wood, there were gatherings of friends on Sunday evenings. An informal meal awaited the guests, who came either on a general invitation or when specially bidden; others put in an appearance later. There would be much talk, from grave to gay, in those plainly appointed rooms, or on a fine summer evening, perhaps, in the garden with its little lawn behind the house. Some music, too, was almost sure to be performed by friends or by the daughters of the house, whose progress in the art of singing was ever a matter of concern to Mr. Herbert Spencer, himself a great lover of music. Letters and Art were well represented there as well as Science, intermingled with the friends of the younger generation. "Here," writes G.W. Smalley,

people from many other worlds than those of abstract science were bidden; where talk was to be heard of a kind rare in any world. It was scientific at times, but subdued to the necessities of the occasion; speculative, yet kept within such bounds that bishop or archbishop might have listened without offence; political even, and still not commonplace, and, when artistic, free from affectation.

There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he cared to, or if challenged. Nobody was more ready in a greater variety of topics, and if they were scientific it was almost always another who introduced them. Unlike some of his comrades of the Royal Society, he was of opinion that man does not live by science alone, and nothing came amiss to him.... Even in private the alarm of war is sometimes heard, and Mr. Huxley is not a whit less formidable as a disputant across the table than with pen in hand. Yet an angry man must be very angry indeed before he could be angry with this adversary. He disarmed his enemies with an amiable grace that made defeat endurable, if not entirely delightful.

If scientific subjects came up in conversation, the luminous style, so familiar in his written work, reappeared in talk.

Yet it has more than that. You cannot listen to him without thinking more of the speaker than of his science, more of the solid beautiful nature than of the intellectual gifts, more of his manly simplicity and sincerity than of all his knowledge and his long services.

But in the intermediate period, from about 1860 onwards, the unceasing rush of occupation rendered it very difficult to keep in touch with his friends. On his initiative a small dining club of scientific friends and allies was established. Almost all these close friends were members of the Royal Society, and were likely to attend its meetings. Dinner, therefore, was to be taken at a convenient hotel before the monthly meeting of the Society, and those who were inevitably drifting apart under the stress of circumstances would have a regular meeting ground. This was the famous _x_ Club, a name singularly appropriate on the principle of _lucus a non lucendo_ to a club of nine members who never proceeded to the election of a tenth. Opinions as to the name and constitution of the little society being no less numerous than the members--indeed more so--"we finally accepted the happy suggestion of our mathematicians to call it the _x_ Club; and the proposal of some genius among us that we should have no rules, save the unwritten law not to have any, was carried by acclamation."

Huxley first propounded the scheme to his most intimate friends, Joseph Dalton Hooker, then Assistant Director of Kew, and John Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. George Busk, the anatomist, afterwards President of the College of Surgeons, was another whose friendship dated from soon after the return of the _Rattlesnake_ to England. Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, and Sir John Lubbock, banker and naturalist, were friends of nearly as long standing. Edward Frankland, Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, and Thomas Archer Hirst, Professor of Physics and Pure Mathematics at University College, London, afterwards Director of Naval Studies at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, entered the circle as special friends of Tyndall's. William Spottiswoode, Queen's Printer and mathematician, was the ninth member, elected by the rest at the first meeting.

Between them they could have managed to contribute most of the articles to a scientific Encyclopædia: six were Presidents of the British Association; three were Associates of the Institute of France; and from among them the Royal Society chose a Secretary, a Foreign Secretary, a Treasurer, and three successive Presidents. Meeting though they did for the sake of friendship and good fellowship, it was inevitable that they should discuss the burning questions of the scientific world freely from varied points of view, and, being all animated by similar ideas of the high function of science and of the great Society, the chief representative of science to which all but one of them belonged, they incidentally exercised a strong influence on the progress of scientific organization.

The first meeting took place on November 3, 1864; nearly nineteen years passed before the circle was broken by the death of Spottiswoode. Proposals were made to fill the gap with a new friend, but, as the _raison d'être_ of the club had been simply the personal attachment of the original nine, the project fell through. Finally, after Hirst's death in 1892, when five out of the remaining six were living away from London and for the most part in uncertain health, it became more and more difficult to arrange a meeting, and the club quietly lapsed after nearly twenty-eight years of existence.

Guests were often entertained at the _x_ dinners, men of science or letters of almost every nationality--a delightful and quite informal mode of personal intercourse. In the summer, also, the _x_ often made a week-end expedition into the country or up the river, in which the wives of the married members took part, the formula for the invitation being _x's + yv's_.

XV

CHARLES DARWIN

To this focus of close friendships Charles Darwin would assuredly have been invited to belong had he been other than an invalid living away from London; for he was the warm and revered friend not only of Huxley, but still more of Hooker, who in age stood midway between the two--eight years younger than the one and eight years older than the other--and who, for some fifteen years before the publication of the _Origin of Species_, had been Darwin's most intimate friend and aid in his work.

Huxley had made Darwin's acquaintance early in the fifties, and soon fell under the spell of his deep thought, his utter sincerity and generous warmth of heart. Darwin, for his part, was strongly attracted by his new friend's penetrating knowledge, incisive criticism, and brilliant conversation. When, in 1858, he began to write out the _Origin_, Huxley was one of the three men he fixed upon by whose judgment of the book he meant to abide. Lyell, who had read the book before it came out, was the first; Hooker, his long-time aid and critic and finally convert, the second. On the eve of publication, secure of these, he adds: "If I can convert Huxley I shall be content."

On all three the effect of the completed book, with its array of detailed argument and evidence, was far greater than that of previous discussions. With one or two reservations as to the logical completeness of the theory, Huxley accepted it as a well-founded working hypothesis, calculated to explain problems otherwise inexplicable. There were evolutionists before Darwin, from Lamarck and the author of the _Vestiges of Creation_ to Herbert Spencer; but as there was no evidence to bear out the orthodox creational view of the Book of _Genesis_, enlarged upon in detail by Milton, so before Darwin the evidence in favour of the transmutation of species was wholly insufficient, and no suggestion which had been made to the causes of the assumed transmutation was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Under such conditions only an agnostic attitude was possible. "So," writes Huxley--

I took refuge in that "_thätige Skepsis_," which Goethe has so well defined, and, reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of the received doctrines when I had to do with the transmutationists, and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the orthodox, thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness.

Then came the publication of the Darwin-Wallace paper in 1858, and of the _Origin_ in 1859, the effect of which he compares to--