1890 REPLY TO DR. ABBOTT 28 1 



As to being a " keen-witted pessimist out and out," the Rev. 

 Dr. Abbott's " horrid example " has shown me the following sen- 

 tence : — " Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of 

 sentient existence as optimism." He says he published it in 

 1888, in an article on " Industrial Development," to be seen in 

 the Nineteenth Century. But no doubt this is another illusion. 

 No superior person, brought up " in the Universities," to boot, 

 could possibly have invented a myth so circumstantial. 



The end of the correspondence was quite amicable. 

 Dr. Abbott explained that he had taken his facts from the 

 recently published " Autobiography," and that the reporters 

 had wonderfully altered what he really said by large omis- 

 sions. In a second letter {Times, October 11) Huxley 

 says : — 



I am much obliged to Dr. Abbott for his courteous explana- 

 tion. I myself have suffered so many things at the hands of so 

 many reporters — of whom it may too often be said that their 

 " faith, unfaithful, makes them falsely true " — that I can fully 

 enter into what his feelings must have been when he contem- 

 plated the picture of his discourse, in which the lights on " raw 

 midshipmen," " pessimist out and out," " devil take the hind- 

 most," and " Heine's dragoon," were so high, while the " good 

 things " he was kind enough to say about me lay in the deep 

 shadow of the invisible. And I can assure Dr. Abbott that I 

 should not have dreamed of noticing the report of his interest- 

 ing lecture, which I read when it appeared, had it not been made 

 the subject of the leading article which drew the attention of 

 all the world to it on the following day. 



I was well aware that Dr. Abbott must have founded his 

 remarks on the brief notice of my life which (without my knowl- 

 edge) has been thrust into its present ridiculous position among 

 biographies of eminent musicians ; and most undoubtedly any- 

 thing I have said there is public property. But erroneous sup- 

 positions imaginatively connected with what I have said appear 

 to me to stand upon a different footing, especially when they are 

 interspersed with remarks injurious to my early friends. Some 

 of the " raw midshipmen and unlearned naval officers " of whom 

 Dr. Abbott speaks, in terms which he certainly did not find in 

 my " autobiography," are, I am glad to say, still alive, and are 

 performing, or have performed, valuable services to their coun- 

 try. I wonder what Dr. Abbott would think, and perhaps say, 



