Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume II Part 53

Ever your loving father,

T.H. Huxley.

Hotel Victoria, Via dei due Macelli, January 16, 1885.

My dear Foster,

It seems to me that I am giving my friends a world of trouble...

I have had a bad week of it, and the night before last was under the impression that I was about to succ.u.mb shortly to a complication of maladies, and moreover, that a wooden box that my wife had just had made would cost thousands of pounds in the way of payment for extra luggage before we reached home. I do not know which hypochondriacal possession was the most depressing. I can laugh at it now, but I really was extraordinarily weak and ill.

We had made up our minds to bolt from Rome to Florence at once, when I suddenly got better, and to-day am all right. So as we hear of snow at Florence we shall stop where we are. It has been raining cats and dogs here, and the Tiber rose 40 feet and inundated the low grounds. But "cantabit elevatus"; it can't touch us, and at any rate the streets are washed clean.

The climate is mild here. We have a capital room and all the sunshine that is to be had, plus a good fire when needful, and at worst one can always get a breezy walk on the Pincio hard by.

However, about the leave. Am I to do anything or nothing? I am dying to get back to steady occupation and English food, and the sort of regimen one can maintain in one's own house. On the other hand, I stand in fear of the bitter cold of February and early March, and still more of the thousand and one worries of London outside one's work. So I suppose it will be better if I keep away till Easter, or at any rate to the end of March. But I must hear something definite from the Home Office. I have written to Donnelly to the same effect. My poor Marian's relapse did not do us any good, for all that I expected it. However the last accounts are very favourable.

I wrote to Evans the other day about a re-arrangement of the duties of the Secretary and a.s.sistant Secretary. I thought it was better to write to him than to you on that subject, and I begged him to discuss the matter with the officers. It is quite absurd that Stokes and you should waste your time in press drudgery.

We are very prudent here, and the climate suits us both, especially my wife, who is so vigorous that I depute her to go and see the Palazzi, and tell me all about them when she comes back. Old Rome is endlessly interesting to me, and I can always potter about and find occupation.

I think I shall turn antiquary--it's just the occupation for a decayed naturalist, though you need not tell the Treasure I say so.

With our love to Mrs. Foster and yourself.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

Hotel Victoria, Via dei due Macelli, January 18, 1885.

My dear Donnelly,

Official sentence of exile for two months more (up to May 12) arrived yesterday. So if my lords will be so kind as to concur I shall be able to disport myself with a clear conscience. I hope their lordships won't think that I am taking things too easy in not making a regular application, and I will do so if you think it better. But if it had rested with me I think I should have got back in February and taken my chance. That energetic woman that owns me, and Michael Foster, however, have taken the game out of my hands, and I have nothing to do but to submit.

On the whole I feel it is wise. I shall have more chance if I escape not only the cold but the bother of London for a couple of months more.

I was very bad a week ago, but I have taken to dosing myself with quinine, and either that or something else has given me a spurt for the last two days, so that I have been more myself than any time since I left, and begin to think that there is life in the old dog yet. If one could only have some fine weather! To-day there is the first real sunshine we have been favoured with for a week.

We are just back from a great function at St. Peter's. It is the festa of St. Peter's chair, and the ex-dragoon Cardinal Howard has been fugleman in the devout adorations addressed to that venerable article of furniture, which, as you ought to know, but probably don't, is inclosed in a bronze double and perched up in a shrine of the worst possible taste in the Tribuna of St. Peter's. The display of man-millinery and lace was enough to fill the lightest-minded woman with envy, and a general concert--some of the music very good--prevented us from feeling dull, while the ci-devant guardsman--big, burly, and bullet-headed--made G.o.d and then eat him.

[A reminiscence of Browning in "The Bishop Orders his Tomb":--

And then how I shall lie through centuries, And hear the blessed mutter of the ma.s.s, And see G.o.d made and eaten all day long.]

I must have a strong strain of Puritan blood in me somewhere, for I am possessed with a desire to arise and slay the whole brood of idolators whenever I a.s.sist at one of these ceremonies. You will observe that I am decidedly better, and have a capacity for a good hatred still.

The last news about Gordon is delightful. The chances are he will rescue Wolseley yet.

With our love.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[To his eldest son.]

Rome, January 20, 1885.

I need hardly tell you that I find Rome wonderfully interesting, and the attraction increases the longer one stays. I am obliged to take care of myself and do but little in the way of sight-seeing, but by directing one's attention to particular objects one can learn a great deal without much trouble. I begin to understand Old Rome pretty well, and I am quite learned in the Catacombs, which suit me, as a kind of Christian fossils out of which one can reconstruct the body of the primitive Church. She was a simple maiden enough and vastly more attractive than the bedizened old harridan of the modern Papacy, so smothered under the old clothes of Paganism which she has been appropriating for the last fifteen centuries that Jesus of Nazareth would not know her if he met her.

I have been to several great papistical functions--among others to the festa of the Cathedra Petri in St. Peter's last Sunday, and I confess I am unable to understand how grown men can lend themselves to such elaborate tomfooleries--nothing but mere fetish worship--in forms of execrably bad taste, devised, one would think, by a college of ecclesiastical man-milliners for the delectation of school-girls. It is curious to notice that intellectual and aesthetic degradation go hand in hand. You have only to go from the Pantheon to St. Peter's to understand the great abyss which lies between the Roman of paganism and the Roman of the papacy. I have seen nothing grander than Agrippa's work--the popes have stripped it to adorn their own petrified lies, but in its nakedness it has a dignity with which there is nothing to compare in the ill-proportioned, worse decorated tawdry stone mountain on the Vatican.

The best thing, from an aesthetic point of view, that could be done with Rome would be to destroy everything except St. Paolo fuori le Mure, of later date than the fourth century.

But you will have had enough of my scrawl, and your mother wants to add something. She is in great force, and is gone prospecting to some Palazzo or other to tell me if it is worth seeing.

Ever your loving father,

T.H. Huxley.

Hotel Victoria, Rome, Via dei due Macelli, January 25, 1885.

My dear Donnelly,

Best thanks for the telegram which arrived the day before yesterday and set my mind at ease.

I have been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the old machine which I inhabit, first with quinine and now with a form of strychnia (which Clark told me to take) for the last week, and I have improved a good deal--whether post hoc or proper hoc in the present uncertainty of medical science I decline to give any opinion.

The weather is very cold for Rome--ice an eighth of an inch thick in the Ludovisi Garden the other morning, and every night it freezes, but mostly fine sunshine in the day. (This is a remarkable sentence in point of grammar, but never mind.) The day before yesterday we came out on the Campagna, and it then was as fresh and bracing a breeze as you could get in Northumberland.

We are very comfortable and quiet here, and I hold on--till it gets warmer. I am told that Florence is detestable at present. As for London, our accounts make us shiver and cough.

News about the dynamiting gentry just arrived. A little more mischief and there will be an Irish ma.s.sacre in some of our great towns. If an Irish Parnellite member were to be shot for every explosion I believe the thing would soon stop. It would be quite just, as they are practically accessories.

I think -- would do it if he were Prime Minister. Nothing like a thorough Radical for arbitrary acts of power!

I must be getting better, as my disgust at science has ceased, and I have begun to potter about Roman geology and prehistoric work. You may be glad to learn that there is no evidence that the prehistoric Romans had Roman noses. But as I cannot find any particular prevalence of them among the modern--or ancient except for Caesar--Romani, the fact is not so interesting as it might appear, and I would not advise you to tell -- of it.

Behold a Goak--feeble, but promising of better things.

My wife unites with me with love to Mrs. Donnelly and yourself.

Ever yours,

T.H. Huxley.

[The following letter refers to the fourth edition of the "Lessons in Elementary Physiology," in the preparation of which Dr. Foster had been helping during the summer:--]

Hotel Victoria, Rome, Via dei due Macelli, February 1, 1885.