412 



NATURE 



\Sept. 19, 1872 



it was near one o'clock, Anderson (Faraday's fiitliful 

 assistant) would soon be going to his dinner, when pro- 

 bably he might catch sight of Mr. Faraday coming 

 upstairs. Mr. Abbott waited ; punctually at one Anderson 

 emerged from the laboratory, Mr. Faraday followed, and, 

 recognising his old friend at once, begged him to join 

 them at dinner. " For," added Faraday, " I am a Goth 

 you know, and always dine in the middle of the day." 

 At dinner Faraday told Mr. Abbott a characteristic 

 story about Anderson ; how one morning during his 

 glass experiments he found his assistant had been stoking 

 the furnace all night long. Faraday had told him to 

 keep the fire up, and omitting to release him in the 

 evening, Anderson, with his soldier's excellent experience, 

 stuck to his post till he received the next orders from 

 his master. The fact that this simple obedience was all 

 the assistance Faraday ever had increases the astonish- 

 inent with which one regards the extent of his labours. 

 The secret of the massiveness of Faraday's work was 

 no doubt that he felt he had one aim before him, and 

 therefore he rigidly kept from himself everything that 

 would fritter away his time ; political and commercial 

 matters were passed by ; he had his warfare to accom- 

 plish, and " no man that warreth entangleth himself with 

 the affairs of this life." 



Whilst Faraday found it necessary to shut out society, 

 he enjoyed a social gathering, especially a family of 

 children, whom he would amuse by dexterous experi- 

 ments in glass-blowing, or with other less scientific 

 manipulation. He liked occasionally to take his nephews 

 to the pantomime, himself enjoying, as he said, " the im- 

 mense concentration of means which it requires." Or he 

 would attend in his early days, as Dr. Gladstone tells us, 

 " the artistic and musical conversaziones at Hullmandel's, 

 where Stanfield, Turner, and Landseer met Garcia and 

 Malibran ; and sometimes he would join this pleasant 

 company at supper and charades, at others in their ex- 

 cursions up the river in an eight-oared cutter." 



His delight in giving others pleasure showed itself con- 

 tinually. Hewasconsideratcand courtcoustothelowestscr- 

 vant at the Royal Institution. The writer can testify to the 

 enduring impression made by his words of kind en- 

 couragement and acts of thoughtfid friendship towards 

 the assistants in the laboratory. As Dr. Bence Jones well 

 remarks, his humility had a living root in his religion. 

 Of the intense earnestness of the religious aspect of his 

 nature, it does not become us here to speak ; he did not 

 talk, but he lived Christianiiy. He rose above his pecu- 

 liar creed. In no sense contracted or censorious, he shed 

 a warm radiance on all with whom he came into contact. 

 It was impossible to dwell in his presence without feeling 

 all that was best in one's nature rising to the surface. 

 Most tender and touching were the words he addressed 

 to sorrowing friends. What a depth of affection is 

 revealed by the following letter, written to a lady who 

 had recently lost her husband : — 



" Believe that I sympathise with you inost deeply, for I 

 enjoy in my life-partner those things which you speak of 

 as making you feel your loss so heavily. 



" It is the kindly domestic affections, the worthiness, 

 the mutual aid in sorrow, the mutual joy in happiness 

 which has existed, which makes the rupture of such a tic 

 as yours so heavy to bear ; and yet you would not wish 

 it otherwise, for the remembrance of those things brings 



solace with the grief. I speak, thinking what my own 

 trouble would be if I lost my partner, and I try to com- 

 fort you in the only way in which I think I could be 

 comforted." 



We are reminded by this and other letters of Faraday, 

 that the inner life of a man is best seen in the letters to 

 his intimate friends never meant for publicatim. In 

 Faraday's exquisite letters, exquisite because so u'tcrl/ 

 artless, are revealed the happy, loving spirit, and, as Mr. 

 Ruskin would say, the '^fineness of nature "he possessed. 



Another striking characteristic of Faraday was the 

 quiet and unostentatious manner in which he did every- 

 thing. His style of lecturing was so simple and easy as 

 to appear effortless. This apparent absence of effort is, 

 however, the climax of self-culture. A man only does 

 that perfectly well which he does without the evidence of 

 exertion. Faraday had reached this point through the 

 mental discipline to which he habitually subjected him- 

 self He translated into practice the words in which he 

 expresses his own " strong belief that that point of self- 

 education which consists in teaching the mind to resist 

 its desires and inclinations until they are proved to be 

 right, is the most important of all, not only in affairs of 

 natural philosophy, but in every department of life." 



With all this stern reality there was also a fine poetic 

 fancy in Faraday. To him the Universe was no machine. 

 His was " a face-to-face, heart-to-heart, inspection of 

 things," and this,asCarlyle says, is " the first characteristic 

 of all good thought in all times." Scientific phraseology 

 never hid from him the grandeur and mystery that at 

 bottom lies in everything. A thunder-storm was to him 

 no mere affair of positive and negative electricity, no 

 mere discharge of electric potential, but something in- 

 finitely beyond all this — " a window through which he 

 looked int) Infinitude itself" Dr. Gladstone tells us "he 

 would stand gazing at the lightning, a stranger to fe.ar, 

 with his mind full of lofty thoughts, or perhaps of high 

 communings. .Sometimes, too, if the storm were at a 

 little distance, he would summon a cab, and in spite of 

 the pelting rain, drive to the scene of awful beauty." A 

 friend thus met him once at Eastbourne, " in the thick of 

 a tremendous storm, rubbing his hands with delight 

 because he had been fortunate enough to see the lightning 

 strike the church tower." 



We are told that a new fact " seemed to charge him 

 with an energy that gleamed through his eyes and quivered 

 through his limbs." The writer remembers an illustration 

 of this, when Dr. Tyndall brought Mr. Faraday into the 

 laboratory to look at his new discovery of calorescence. 

 As Faraday saw for the first time a piece of cold, black 

 platinum raised to a dazzling brightness when held in the 

 focus of dark rays, a point undistinguishable from the air 

 around, he looked on attentively, putting on his spectacles 

 to observe more carefully, then ascertained the conditions 

 of the experiment, and repeated it for himself ; and now 

 quite satisfied he turned with emotion to Dr. Tyndall and 

 almost hugged him with pleasure. And so on another 

 occasion, when Prof. Pliicker was showing in the laboratory 

 some lovely expeiimcnts with vacuum tubes, Faraday 

 literally danced with delight round the electric discharge, 

 exclaiming, as he gazed at the moving arches of light, 

 " Oh ! to live always in it ! " 



We have said enough. Our readers will forgive us for 

 recalling a character which many of them know far 



