280 



KNOWLEDGE. 



[December 1, 1900. 



for an eternally combative man to have, and impossible 

 to be had by a mean man, the constancy and devotion 

 of an incomparable band of friends. 



The foregoing remarks are naturally suggested by the 

 '' Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley," now- 

 given to the world by his son. The volumes might 

 possibly have borne a little compression, a little re- 

 arrangement, a little more consideratcness for living 

 relatives of his dead antagonists. But the gaiety of 

 nations will in no way be eclipsed by many of the out- 

 spoken judgments, and the cousins of Mr. X. or Mr. Y. 

 may console themselves by observing that their kins- 

 man is in the same boat with Lord Bacon. All these 

 hundreds of pages are of a quality to be read with 

 pleasure. They are of value for example of life and 

 instruction of manners, including, like other books that 

 have been so described, the exemplum ad vitanclum 

 along with things meet for imitation. There are many 

 essential lessons involved, which haply some may learn 

 to good effect, without knowing that they are being 

 taught. 



It cannot be expected that Huxley, followed through 

 the i^ugnacity of a lifetime, will satisfy every taste or 

 command assent to every opinion in the records of this 

 nan'ative. That is a fortunate circumstance, perhaps 

 foreseen and rejoiced in by his clever and filial bio- 

 grapher. He is not set before us as the Admirable 

 Crichtou of a novel, still less as merely " prig," " savant,'' 

 or " Gelehrte," wittily assumed by the late Henry 

 Sidgwick to be convertible terms. He is presented to 

 us as a thoroughly human being, fighting at school, 

 joking with middies on board the " Rattlesnake," fancy- 

 ing as a young man (sublimely innocent creature) that 

 he was indifferent to money and fame, owning from first 

 to last that he loved his friends and hated his enemies. 

 Beyond a doubt the high lights of his portrait are 

 relieved by occasional shadows. Of Tennyson he became 

 a stalwart ally and admirer, but at twenty-seven, just 

 after the Duke of Wellington's funeral, he wi'ites to his 

 betrothed, " I send Tennyson's ode by way of packing — 

 it is not worth much more, the only decent passages t« 

 my mind being those I have marked." In his table- 

 talk he quotes with evident approval a saying by Sir 

 Henry Holland, " In my opinion Plato was an ass ! 

 But don't tell any one I said so!" The world would 

 have suffered no substantial loss if this confidence had 

 not b?en broken. Gladstone on Gadai'a he attacked with 

 much controversial success, but he privately owns that 

 his assault was designed to weaken Gladstone's political 

 position. " As to Gladstone and his ' Impregnable Rock,' 

 it wa?n't worth attacking them for themselves, but it was 

 most important at that moment to shake him in the minds 

 of sensible men." That way of indirectly undermining 

 an opponent may or may not be decent in the law-courts. 

 It is scarcely a specimen of chivalrous, of Huxleyan, 

 straightforwardness, but rather on a par with the con- 

 troversial methods of a journalist who vindicates his 

 own judgment on military tactics or the chemistry of the 

 sun by showing that the other man is weak in spelling 

 or faulty in syntax. Huxley was an eminent apostle of 

 education for girls as well as boys, for women as well as 

 men, for teachers as well as the taught, and yet we read 

 (Vol. I., p. 212), of his preparing his " claws and beak " 

 to keep women out of scientific societies, almcst as if 

 in 1860 he prophetically sympathized with the Austrian 

 medical students of 1900. He had come to the impolite, 

 may one be permitted to say the unworthy, conclusion, 

 that five-sixths of womankind would never be anything 

 but " intrigues " in politics, and " friponnes " in science. 



But perhaps in the end he found repentance (see Vol. I., 

 p. 417). Wonderfully diversified as his knowledge 

 was, it had its limits, or he could never have written to 

 Kiugslcy that the Latin affirmation " Cogito " was pre- 

 ferable to the English " I think," " because the latter 

 asserts the existence of an Ego — about which the bundle 

 of phenomena at present addressing you knows nothing," 

 though obviously the Ego is just as completely involved 

 in the affix of Cogito as it is in the prefix of / think. He 

 fancied that " Newton and Cuvier lowered themselves 

 when the one accepted an idle knighthood, and the other 

 became a baron of the empire," not considering that 

 the jjride of a cynic may sometimes be seen through the 

 holes of his mantle, and that there may be as much 

 vaingloriousness in refusing a title as in wearing one. 



The story of what may be called the Battle of Oxford, 

 in 1860, is here, as it was bound to be, told once more. 

 It is told from the mouth of many witnesses. They are 

 men of veracity and intelligence. They report words 

 publicly spoken, and spoken under circumstances of 

 exceptionally quickened attention, though no doubt also 

 under circumstances of exceptional excitement. The 

 extraordinary upshot is that no one can now be sure of 

 what was really said either by Samuel Wilberforce or 

 by Thomas Huxley. All evolutionists are agreed that 

 Huxley won on that occasion a striking and valuable 

 triumph. But it was almost certainly a triumph of his 

 rhetoric, not his logic, of audacity, not of good taste. 

 The Bishop of Oxford indulged in what he and his party 

 probably deemed innocent and amusing banter. In 

 return that eminent prelate, in the centre of his own 

 diocese, before a throng of those who revered and loved 

 him, was upbraided, according to one unropudiated 

 account, as a man " who prostituted the gifts of culture 

 and eloquence to the service of prejudice and of false- 

 hood." The absurdity of the thing is transparent when 

 we ask ourselves how long at that date had the scientific 

 world itself been converted to the doctrine of the trans- 

 mutation of species, how much of it was still uncon- 

 verted, and for how many years longer did leaders of 

 science hold out against it in France, in Germany, 

 in America, no less than in England. In the companion 

 picture of 1894, again at Oxford, again before the 

 British Association, and once more matched in a con- 

 flict of wits with a master of eloquence and sarcasm, 

 Huxley stands forth, as some will think, a second time 

 victorious. But now the tiiumph is won by refinement 

 of taste, not by bitterness of retort. Put forward to 

 second the vote of thanks for an address, in which the 

 existing state of biological science had been treated with 

 mockei-y, Huxley knew how to applaud what was laud- 

 able in the discourse without approving what was open 

 to debate, and some will remember the dignity of tone 

 and aspect, with which, alluding to his own share in the 

 long Darwinian campaign, he uttered the words, " We 

 of the Old Guard stand firm." 



What these volumes tell us of Huxley's researches and 

 his writings, of his innumerable lectures, of his work for 

 societies, associations, congresses, institutions, royal com- 

 missions, and popular or unpopular causes, will make 

 some readers wonder how a lifetime coidd contain it all. 

 No doubt he crowded into his days more than his 

 strength could bear, and had in consequence many penal- 

 ties to pay, or, to use more strictly philosophical lan- 

 guage, what followed, followed. None the less he lived the 

 life of his choice. He won almost every sort of success 

 that is open to such a career. He was always arguing, 

 and always getting the better or the best of the ai-gument. 

 He called himself, it is true, an Agnostic, or Know- 



