Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume I Part 13

My dearest Lizzie,

First let me congratulate you on being safe over your troubles and in possession of another possible President. I think it may be worth coming over twenty years hence on the possibility of picking up something or other from one of my nephews at Washington.

[He sends some money.] Would it were more worth your having, but I have not as yet got on to Tom Tiddler's ground on this side of the water. You need not be alarmed about my having involved myself in any way--such portion of it as is of my sending has been conquered by mine own sword and spear, and the rest came from Mary. [Mrs. George Huxley]...

[After giving a summary of his struggle with the Admiralty, he proceeds]--If I were to tell you all the intriguing and humbug there has been about my unfortunate grant--which yet granted--it would occupy this letter, and though a very good ill.u.s.tration of the encouragement afforded to Science in this country, would not be very amusing. Once or twice it has fairly died out, only to be stirred up again by my own pertinacity. However, I have hopes of it at last, as I hear Lord Rosse is just about to make another application to the present Government on the subject. While this business has been dragging on of course I have not been idle. I have four memoirs (on various matters in Comparative Anatomy) in the "Philosophical Transactions," and they have given me their Fellowship and one of the Royal medals. I have written a whole lot of things for the journals--reviews for the "British and Foreign Quarterly Medical," etc. I am one of the editors of Taylor's "Scientific Memoirs" (German scientific translations). In conjunction with my friend Busk I am translating a great German book on the "Microscopical Anatomy of Man," and I have engaged to write a long article for Todd's "Cyclopaedia." Besides this, have read two long memoirs at the British a.s.sociation, and have given two lectures at the Royal Inst.i.tution--one of them only two days ago, when I was so ill with influenza I could hardly stand or speak.

Furthermore, I have been a candidate for a Professorship of Natural History at Toronto (which is not even yet decided); for one at Aberdeen, which has been given against me; and at present I am a candidate for the Professorship of Physiology at King's College, or, rather, for half of it--Todd having given up, and Bowman, who remains, being willing to take only half, and that he will soon give up. My friend Edward Forbes--a regular brick, who has backed me through thick and thin--is backing me for King's College, where he is one of the Professors. My chance is, I believe, very good, but nothing can be more uncertain than the result of the contest. If they don't take one of their own men I think they will have me. It would suit me very well, and the whole chair is worth 400 pounds sterling a year, and would enable me to live.

Something I must make up my mind to do, and that speedily. I can get honour in Science, but it doesn't pay, and "honour heals no wounds." In truth I am often very weary. The longer one lives the more the ideal and the purpose vanishes out of one's life, and I begin to doubt whether I have done wisely in giving vent to the cherished tendency towards Science which has haunted me ever since my childhood. Had I given myself to Mammon I might have been a respectable member of society with large watch-seals by this time. I think it is very likely that if this King's College business goes against me, I may give up the farce altogether--burn my books, burn my rod, and take to practice in Australia. It is no use to go on kicking against the p.r.i.c.ks...

CHAPTER 1.8.

1854.

[The year 1854 marks the turning-point in Huxley's career. The desperate time of waiting came to an end. By the help of his lectures and his pen, he could at all events stand and wait independently of the Navy. He could not, of course, think of immediate marriage, nor of asking Miss Heathorn to join him in England; but it so happened that her father was already thinking of returning home, and finally this was determined upon just before Professor Forbes' translation to a chair at Edinburgh gave Huxley what turned out to be the long-hoped-for permanency in London.]

June 3, 1854.

I have often spoken to you of my friend Edward Forbes. He has quite recently been suddenly appointed to a Professorial Chair in Edinburgh, vacated by the death of old Jamieson. He was obliged to go down there at once and lecture, and as he had just commenced his course at the Government School of Mines in Jermyn Street, it was necessary to obtain a subst.i.tute. He had spoken to me of the possibility of his being called away long ago, and had asked if I would take his place, to which, of course, I a.s.sented, but the whole affair was so uncertain that I never in any way reckoned upon it. Even at last I did not know on the Monday whether I was to go on for him on the Friday or not. However, he did go after giving two lectures, and on Friday the 25th May I took his lecture, and I have been going on ever since, twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. Called upon so very suddenly to give a course of some six and twenty lectures, I find it very hard work, but I like it and I never was in better health.

[On July 20, this temporary work, which he had undertaken as the friend of Forbes, was exchanged for one of the permanent lectureships formerly held by the latter. A hundred a year for twenty-six lectures was not affluence; it would have suited him better to have had twice the work and twice the pay. But it was his crossing of the Rubicon, and, strangely enough, no sooner had he gained this success than it was doubled.]

July 30, 1854.

I was appointed yesterday to a post of 200 pounds sterling a year. It has all come about in the strangest way. I told you how my friend Forbes had been suddenly called away to Edinburgh, and that I had suddenly taken his duties--sharp work it has been I can tell you these summer months, but it is over and done satisfactorily. Forbes got 500 pounds sterling a year, 200 pounds sterling for a double lectureship, 300 pounds sterling for another office. I took one of the lectureships, which would have given me 100 pounds sterling a year only, and another man was to have the second lectureship and the other office in question.

It was so completely settled a week ago that I had written to the President of the Board of Trade who makes the appointment, accepting mine, and the other man had done the same. Happily for me, however, my new colleague was suddenly afflicted with a sort of moral colic, an absurd idea that he could not perform the duties of his office, and resigned it. The result is that a new man has been appointed to the office he left vacant, while the lectureship was offered to me. Of course I took it, and so in the course of the week I have seen my paid income doubled...So after a short interval I have become a Government officer again, but in rather a different position I flatter myself. I am chief of my own department, and my position is considered a very good one--as good as anything of its kind in London.

[Furthermore, on August 11 he was "entrusted with the Coast Survey investigations under the Geological Survey, and remunerated by fee until March 31, 1855, when he was ranked as Naturalist on the Survey with an additional salary of 200 pounds sterling, afterwards increased to 400 pounds sterling, rising to 600 pounds sterling per annum," as the official statement has it.

Then in quick succession he was offered in August a lectureship on Comparative Anatomy at St. Thomas' Hospital for the following May and June, and in September he was asked to lecture in November and March for the Science and Art Department at Marlborough House.

Now therefore, with the Heathorns coming to England, his plans and theirs exactly fitted, and he proposed to get married as soon as they came over, early in the following summer.

A letter of this year deserves quoting as ill.u.s.trating the directness of Huxley's dealings with his friends, and his hatred of doing anything unknown to them which might be misreported to them or misconstrued without explanation. As a member of the Royal Society Council, it was his duty to vote upon the persons to whom the yearly medals of the Society should be awarded. For the Royal Medal first Hooker was named, and received his hearty support; then Forbes, in opposition to Hooker, in his eyes equally deserving of recognition, and almost more closely bound to him by ties of friendship, so that whatever action he took, might be ascribed to motives which should have no part in such a selection. The course actually taken by him he explained at length in letters to both Forbes and Hooker.]

November 6, 1854.

My dear Hooker,

I have been so busy with lecturing here and there that I have not had time to write and congratulate you on the award of the medal. The queer position in which I was placed prevents me from being able to congratulate MYSELF on having any finger in the pie, but I am quite sure there was no member of the Council who felt more strongly than myself that what honour the bauble could confer was most fully won, and no more than your just deserts; or who rejoiced more when the thing was settled in your favour.

However, I do trust that I shall never be placed in such an awkward position again. I would have given a great deal to be able to back Forbes tooth and nail--not only on account of my personal friendship and affection for him, but because I think he well deserves such recognition. And had I thought right to do so, I felt sure that you would have fully appreciated my motives, and that it would have done no injury to our friendship.

But as I told the Council I did not think this a case where either of you had any right to be excluded by the other. I told them that had Forbes been first named, I should have thought it injudicious to bring you forward, and that, as you were named, I for my own part should not have brought forward Forbes as a candidate; that therefore while willing to speak up to any extent for Forbes' POSITIVE merits and deserts, I would carefully be understood to give no opinion as to your and his RELATIVE standing.

They did not take much by my speech therefore either way, more especially as I voted for BOTH of you.

I hate doing anything of the kind "unbeknownst" to people, so there is the exact history of my proceedings. If I had been able to come to the clear conclusion that the claims of either of you were strongly superior to those of the other, I think I should have had the honesty and moral courage to "act accordin'," but I really had not, and so there was no part to play but that of a sort of Vicar of Bray.

Ever yours faithfully,

T.H. Huxley.

[Forbes' reply was a letter which Huxley, after his friend's death, held] "among his most precious possessions." [It appeared without names in the obituary notice of Forbes in the "Literary Gazette" for November 25, 1854, as an example of his unselfish generosity:--

I heartily concur in the course you have taken, and had I been placed as you have been, would have done exactly the same...Your way of proceeding was as true an act of friendship as any that could be performed. As to myself, I dream so little about medals, that the notion of being on the list never entered my brain, even when asleep. If it ever comes I shall be pleased and thankful; if it does not, it is not the sort of thing to break my equanimity. Indeed, I would always like to see it given not as a mere honour, but as a help to a good man, and this it is a.s.suredly in Hooker's case. Government people are so ignorant that they require to have merits drummed into their heads by all possible means, and Hooker's getting the medal may be of real service to him before long. I am in a snug, though not an idle nest,--he has not got his resting-place yet.

And so, my dear Huxley, I trust that you know me too well to think that I am either grieved or envious, and you, Hooker, and I are much of the same way of thinking.

It is interesting to record the same scrupulosity over the election to the Registrarship of the University of London in 1856, when, having begun to canva.s.s for Dr. Latham before his friend Dr. W.B. Carpenter entered the field, he writes to Hooker:--]

I at once, of course told Carpenter precisely what I had done. Had I known of his candidature earlier, I should certainly have taken no active part on either side--not for Latham, because I would not oppose Carpenter, and not for Carpenter, because his getting the Registrarship would probably be an advantage for me, as I should have a good chance of obtaining the Examinership in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy which he would vacate. Indeed, I refused to act for Carpenter in a case in which he asked me to do so, partly for this reason and partly because I felt thoroughly committed to Latham. Under these circ.u.mstances I think you are quite absolved from any pledge to me. It's deuced hard to keep straight in this wicked world, but as you say the only chance is to out with it, and I thank you much for writing so frankly about the matter. I hope it will be as fine as to-day at Down. [(Charles Darwin's home in Kent.)

Unfortunately the method was not so successful with smaller minds. Once in 1852, when he had to report unfavourably on a paper for the "Annals of Natural History" on the structure of the Starfishes, sent in by an acquaintance, he felt it right not to conceal his action, as he might have done, behind the referee's usual screen of anonymity, but to write a frank account of the reasons which had led him so to report, that he might both clear himself of the suspicion of having dealt an unfair blow in the dark, and give his acquaintance the opportunity of correcting and enlarging his paper with a view of submitting it again for publication.

In this case the only result was an impa.s.sioned correspondence, the author even going so far as to suggest that Huxley had condemned the paper without having so much as dissected an Echinoderm in his life! and then all intercourse ceased, till years afterwards the gentleman in question realised the weaknesses of his paper and repented him of his wrath.

Before leaving London to begin his work at Tenby as Naturalist to the Survey, he delivered at St. Martin's Hall, on July 22, an address on the "Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences. (The subsequent reference is to the words, "I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms will bear his own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the divine government, which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake, to be corrected by and by." ("Collected Essays"

3 page 62.) This essay contains the definition of science as "trained and organised common sense," and the reference to a new "Peter Bell"

which suggested Miss May Kendall's spirited parody of Wordsworth:--

Primroses by the river's brim Dicotyledons were to him, And they were nothing more.)

This, when it came out later as a pamphlet, he sent to his Tenby friend Dr. Dyster (of whom hereafter), to whose criticism on one pa.s.sage he replied on October 10:--]

...I am rejoiced you liked my speechment. It was written hastily and is, like its speaker, I fear, more forcible than eloquent, but it can lay claim to the merit of being sincere.

My intention on page 28 was by no means to express any satisfaction at the worms being as badly off as ourselves, but to show that pain being everywhere is inevitable, and therefore like all other inevitable things to be borne. The rest of it is the product of my scientific Calvinism, which fell like a sh.e.l.l at your feet when we were talking over the fire.

I doubt, or at least I have no confidence in, the doctrine of ultimate happiness, and I am more inclined to look the opposite possibility fully in the face, and if that also be inevitable, make up my mind to bear it also.

You will tell me there are better consolations than Stoicism; that may be, but I do not possess them, and I have found my "grin and bear it"

philosophy stand me in such good stead in my course through oceans of disgust and chagrin, that I should be loth to give it up.

[The summer of 1854 was spent in company with the Busks at Tenby, amid plenty of open-air work and in great peace of mind, varied with a short visit to Liverpool in order to talk business with his friend Forbes, who was eager that Huxley should join him in Edinburgh.]

Tenby, South Wales, September 3, 1854.

I have been here since the middle of August, getting rid of my yellow face and putting on a brown one, banishing dyspepsias and hypochondrias and all such other town afflictions to the four winds, and rejoicing exceedingly that I am out of the way of that pest, the cholera, which is raging just at present in London.

After I had arranged to come here to do a lot of work of my own which can only be done by the seaside, our Director, Sir Henry de la Beche, gave me a special mission of his own whereby I have the comfort of having my expenses paid, but at the same time get it taken out of me in additional labour, so my recreation is anything but leisure.

October 14.

I left this place for a week's trip to Liverpool in the end of September. The meeting of the British a.s.sociation was held there, but I went not so much to be present as to meet Forbes, with whom I wanted to talk over many matters concerning us both. Forbes had a proposition that I should go to Edinburgh to take part of the duties of the Professor of Physiology there, who is in bad health, with the ultimate aim of succeeding to the chair. It was a tempting offer made in a flattering manner, and presenting a prospect of considerably better emolument than my special post, but it had the disadvantage of being but an uncertain position. Had I accepted, I should have been at the mercy of the actual Professor--and that is a position I don't like standing in, even with the best of men, and had he died or resigned at any time the Scotch chairs are so disposed of that there would have been nothing like a certainty of my getting the post, so I definitely declined--I hope wisely.

After some talk, Forbes agreed with my view of the case, so he is off to Edinburgh, and I shall go off to London. I hope to remain there for my life long.