Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume III Part 64

As I was going along Upper Thames

Street just now, I saw between Numbers 170 and 211 ( (primary parenthesis) but you would like to know what I was going along that odorous street for. Well, it was to inquire how the pen with which I am now writing--( (2nd parenthesis) you see it is a new-fangled fountain pen, warranted to cure the worst writing and always spell properly) (2nd parenthesis)--works, because it would not work properly this morning. And the nice young woman who took it from me--( (3rd parenthesis) as who should say you old foodle!) (3rd parenthesis) inked her own fingers enormously ( (4th parenthesis) which I told her I was pleased they were her fingers rather than mine) (4th parenthesis)--But she only smole. ( (5th parenthesis) Close by was another shop where they sold hose--( (6th or 7th parenthesis) indiarubber, not knitted)--( (nth parenthesis) and warranted to let water through, not keep it out); and I asked for a garden syringe, thinking such things likely to be kept by hosiers of that sort--and they said they had not any, but found they had a remnant cheap ( (nnth parenthesis) price 3 shillings) which is less than many people pay for the other hosiers' hose) (end of parentheses) a doorpost at the side of the doorway of some place of business with this remarkable notice:

RULING GIRLS WANTED.

Don't you think you had better apply at once? Jack will give you a character, I am sure, on the side of the art of ruling, and I will speak for the science--also of hereditary (on mother's side) instinct.

Well I am not sure about the pen yet--but there is no room for any more.

Ever your loving

Dad.

Epistolary composition on the model of a Gladstonian speech to a deputation on women's suffrage.

[The other is to his daughter, Mrs. Harold Roller, who had sent him from abroad a friend's autograph-book for a signature:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 1, 1893.

The epistle of Thomas to the woman of the house of Harold.

1. I said it was an autograph-book; and so it was.

2. And naughty words came to the root of my tongue.

3. And the recording angel dipped his pen in the ink and squared his elbows to write.

4. But I spied the hand of the lovely and accomplished but vagabond daughter.

5. And I smole; and spoke not; nor uttered the naughty words.

6. So the recording angel was sold;

7. And was about to suck his pen.

8. But I said Nay! give it to me.

9. And I took the pen and wrote on the book of the Autographs letters pleasant to the eye and easy to read.

10. Such as my printers know not: nor the postman--nor the correspondent, who riseth in his wrath and curseth over my epistle ordinary.

[This to his youngest daughter, which, in jesting form, conveys a good deal of sound sense, was the sequel to a discussion as to the advisability of a University education for her own and another boy:--]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, May 9, 1892.

Dearest Babs,

Bickers and Son have abased themselves, and a.s.sure me that they have fetched the Dictionary away and are sending it here. I shall believe them when it arrives.

As a rule, I do not turn up when I announce my coming, but I believe I shall be with you about dinnertime on Friday next (13th).

In the meanwhile, my good daughter, meditate these things:

1. Parents not too rich wish to send exceptionally clever, energetic lad to university--before taking up father's profession of architect.

2. Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will be well taught cla.s.sics at school--not well taught in other things--will easily get a scholarship either at school or university. So much in parents' pockets.

3. Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will get as much mathematics, mechanics, and other needful preliminaries to architecture, as he wants (and a good deal more if he likes) at Oxford. Excellent physical school there.

4. Splendid Art museums at Oxford.

5. Prigs not peculiar to Oxford.

6. Don Cambridge would choke science (except mathematics) if it could as willingly as Don Oxford and more so.

7. Oxford always represents English opinion, in all its extremes, better than Cambridge.

8. Cambridge better for doctors, Oxford for architects, poets, painters, and-all-that-sort-of-cattle (all crossed out).

9. LAWRENCE WILL GO TO OXFORD and become a real scholar, which is a great thing and a n.o.ble. He will combine the new and the old, and show how much better the world would have been if it had stuck to h.e.l.lenism.

You are dreaming of the schoolboy who does not follow up his work, or becomes a mere poll man. Good enough for parsons, not for men. LAWRENCE WILL GO TO OXFORD.

Ever your aggrawatin'

Pa.

[Like the old Greek sage and statesman, my father might have declared that old age found him ever learning. Not indeed with the fiery earnestness of his young days of stress and storm; but with the steady advance of a practised worker who cannot be unoccupied. History and philosophy, especially biblical criticism, composed his chief reading in these later years.

Fortune had ceased her buffets; broken health was restored; and from his resting-place among his books and his plants he watched keenly the struggle which had now pa.s.sed into other hands, still ready to strike a blow if need be, or even, on rare occasions, to return to the fighting line, as when he became a leader in the movement for London University reform.

His days at Eastbourne, then, were full of occupation, if not the occupation of former days. The day began as early; he never relaxed from the rule of an eight o'clock breakfast. Then a pipe and an hour and a half of letter-writing or working at an essay. Then a short expedition around the garden, to inspect the creepers, tend the saxifrages, or see how the more exposed shrubs could best be sheltered from the shrivelling winds. The gravelled terrace immediately behind the house was called the Quarterdeck; it was the place for a brisk patrolling in uncertain weather or in a north wind. In the lower garden was a parallel walk protected from the south by a high double hedge of cypress and golden elder, designed for shelter from the summer sun and southerly winds.

Then would follow another spell of work till near one o'clock; the weather might tempt him out again before lunch; but afterwards he was certain to be out for an hour or two from half-past two. However hard it blew, and Eastbourne is seldom still, the tiled walk along the sea-wall always offered the possibility of a const.i.tutional. But the high expanse of the Downs was his favourite walk. The air of Beachy Head, 560 feet up, was an unfailing tonic. In the summer he used to keep a look-out for the little flowers of the short, close turf of the chalk which could remind him of his Alpine favourites, in particular the curious phyteuma; and later on, in the folds of the hills where he had marked them, the English Gentians.

After his walk, a cup of tea was followed by more reading or writing till seven; after dinner another pipe, and then he would return to my mother in the drawing-room, and settle down in his particular armchair, with some tough volume of history or theology to read, every now and again scoring a pa.s.sage for future reference, or jotting a brief note on the margin. At ten he would migrate to the study for a final smoke before going to bed.

Such was his routine, broken by occasional visits to town on business, for he was still Dean of the Royal College of Science and a trustee of the British Museum. Old friends came occasionally to stay for a few days, and tea-time would often bring one or two of the small circle of friends whom he had made in Eastbourne. These also he occasionally visited, but he scarcely ever dined out. The talking was too tiring.

The change to Eastbourne cut away a whole series of interests, but it imported a new and very strong one into my father's life. His garden was not only a convenient ambulatory, but, with its growing flowers and trees, became a novel and intense pleasure, until he began] "to think with Candide that 'Cultivons notre jardin' comprises the whole duty of man."

[It was strange that this interest should have come suddenly at the end of his life. Though he had won the prize in Lindley's botanical cla.s.s, he had never been a field botanist till he was attracted by the Swiss gentians. As has been said before, his love of nature had never run to collecting either plants or animals. Mere "spider-hunters and hay-naturalists," as a German friend called them, he was inclined to regard as the camp-followers of science. It was the engineering side of nature, the unity of plan of animal construction, worked out in infinitely varying detail, which engrossed him. Walking once with Hooker in the Rhone valley, where the gra.s.s was alive with red and green gra.s.shoppers, he said,] "I would give anything to be as interested in them as you are."

[But this feeling, unknown to him before, broke out in his gentian work. He told Hooker, "I can't express the delight I have in them." It continued undiminished when once he settled in the new house and laid out a garden. His especial love was for the rockery of Alpines, many of which came from Sir J. Hooker.

Here, then, he threw himself into gardening with characteristic ardour.

He described his position as a kind of mean between the science of the botanist and the empiricism of the working gardener. He had plenty to suggest, but his gardener, like so many of his tribe, had a rooted mistrust of any gardening lore culled from books. "Books? They'll say anything in them books." And he shared, moreover, that common superst.i.tion, perhaps really based upon a question of labour, that watering of flowers, unnecessary in wet weather, is actively bad in dry. So my father's chief occupation in the garden was to march about with a long hose, watering, and watering especially his alpines in the upper garden and along the terraces lying below the house. The saxifrages and the creepers on the house were his favourite plants.

When he was not watering the one he would be nailing up the other, for the winds of Eastbourne are remarkably boisterous, and shrivel up what they do not blow down.] "I believe I shall take to gardening," [he writes, a few months after entering the new house,] "if I live long enough. I have got so far as to take a lively interest in the condition of my shrubs, which have been awfully treated by the long cold."