Part 6

I used always to admire the simple and businesslike way in which Huxley made his entry on great occasions. He hated anything like display, and would have none of it. At the Royal Institution, more than almost anywhere else, the lecturer, on whom the concentric circles of spectators in their steep amphitheatre look down, focuses the gaze. Huxley never seemed aware that anybody was looking at him. From self-consciousness he was, here as elsewhere, singularly free, as from self-assertion. He walked in through the door on the left as if he were entering his own laboratory. In these days he bore scarcely a mark of age. He was in the full vigour of manhood, and looked the man he was.... With a firm step and easy bearing he took his place, apparently without a thought of the people who were cheering him. To him it was an anniversary. He looked, and he probably was, the master. Surrounded as he was by the celebrities of science and the ornaments of London drawing-rooms, there was none who had quite the same kind of intellectual ascendancy which belonged to him. The square forehead, the square jaw, the tense lines of the mouth, the deep, flashing dark eyes, the impression of something more than strength he gave you, an impression of sincerity, of solid force, of immovability, yet with the gentleness arising from the serene consciousness of his strength--all this belonged to Huxley, and to him alone. The first glance magnetized his audience. The eyes were those of one accustomed to command, of one having authority, and not fearing on occasion to use it. The hair swept carelessly away from the broad forehead and grew rather long behind, yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine in everything--look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art, he had, nevertheless, the secret of the highest art of all, whether in oratory or whatever else--he had simplicity. The force was in the thought and the diction, and he needed no other. The voice was rather deep, low, but quite audible; at times sonorous, and always full.... His manner here, in the presence of this select and rather limited audience--for the theatre of the Royal Institution holds, I think, less than a thousand people--was exactly the same as before a great company whom he addressed at Liverpool, as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. I remember going late to that and having to sit far back, yet hearing every word easily; and there, too, the feeling was the same--that he had mastered his audience, taken possession of them, and held them to the end in an unrelaxing grip, as a great actor at his best does. There was nothing of the actor about him, except that he knew how to stand still; but masterful he ever was.

Equally perfect of their kind were his class lectures, which made a deep and lasting impression on his students. In the words of Jeffery Parker, afterwards his assistant:--

His lectures were like his writings, luminously clear, without the faintest disposition to descend to the level of his audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that comparative anatomy was worthy of the devotion of a life, and that to solve a morphological problem was as fine a thing as to win a battle. He was an admirable draughtsman, and his blackboard illustrations were always a great feature of his lectures, especially when, to show the relation of two animal types, he would, by a few rapid strokes and smudges, evolve the one into the other before our eyes. He seemed to have a real affection for some of the specimens illustrating his lectures, and would handle them in a peculiarly loving manner. When he was lecturing on man, for instance, he would sometimes throw his arm over the shoulder of the skeleton beside him and take its hand, as if its silent companionship were an inspiration. To me, his lectures before his small class at Jermyn Street or South Kensington were almost more impressive than the discourses at the Royal Institution, where, for an hour and a-half, he poured forth a stream of dignified, earnest, sincere words in perfect literary form, and without the assistance of a note.

It was no wonder that he was clear and exact in his class lectures, for he based what he had to say on his own experiment and observation, and was at pains to verify experimentally the observations of others which came within his field. Without verification he would not rely upon them. Indeed, he was so careful to give nothing at second hand that one of his scientific friends gently reproached him for wasting his time in re-investigating matters already worked over by competent observers. "Poor ----," he remarked afterwards, "if that is his own practice, his work will never live." Of his most important public addresses, two may be noted as especial tours de force. On each occasion it was specially necessary to speak by the book, but at the last moment it was impossible to use the carefully prepared notes. One was the address on the complex and difficult subject of "Animals as Automata," at the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 1874, when the atmosphere was electrical after a Presidential address by John Tyndall which set theologians in an uproar. Years afterwards he described the incident to Sir E. Ray Lankester:--

I knew that I was treading on very dangerous ground, so I wrote out uncommonly full and careful notes, and had them in my hand when I stepped on to the platform.

Then I suddenly became aware of the bigness of the audience, and the conviction came upon me that, if I looked at my notes, not one half would hear me. It was a bad ten seconds, but I made my election and turned the notes face downwards on the desk.

To this day I do not exactly know how the thing managed to roll itself out; but it did, as you say, for the best part of an hour and a-half.

There's a story pour vous encourager if you are ever in a like fix.

The other was his address at the opening of the John Hopkins University at Baltimore in 1876. Late on the preceding afternoon he returned very tired from an expedition to Washington, to find that a formal dinner and reception awaited him in the evening. He snatched an hour or two of rest, when a New York reporter arrived demanding the text of the address, which had to be sent to New York for simultaneous publication with the Baltimore papers. Now the address was not written out; it was to be delivered from notes only. From these notes, then, he delivered it in extenso to the reporter, who took it down in shorthand, and promised to let him have a copy to lecture from next morning. But the fair copy did not come till the last moment. To his horror he found this was written out upon "flimsy," from which it would be impossible to read properly. Again he turned it down on the desk and boldly trusted to memory. This second version was taken down verbatim by the Baltimore reporters in their turn. What if it did not tally with the New York version? As a matter of fact, it was almost identical, save for a few curious discrepancies, apparent contradictions between professed eye-witnesses which the ingenious critic might perfectly well use to prove that both accounts were fictitious, and that the pretended original was never delivered under the conditions alleged.

Mention has been made of his lectures to working men. Of these his assistant and successor, Professor G.B. Howes, wrote:--

Great as were his class lectures, his working-men's were greater. Huxley was a great believer in the distillatio per ascensum of scientific knowledge and culture, and spared no pains in approaching the artisan and so-called "working classes." He gave the workmen of his best. The substance of his Man's Place in Nature, one of the most successful and popular of his writings, and of his Crayfish, perhaps the most perfect zoological treatise ever published, was first communicated to them. In one of the last conversations I had with him, I asked his views on the desirability of discontinuing the workmen's lectures at Jermyn Street, since the development of working men's colleges and institutes is regarded by some to have rendered their continuance unnecessary. He replied, almost with indignation: "With our central position and resources, we ought to be in a position to give the workmen that which they cannot get elsewhere"; adding that he would deeply deplore any such discontinuance.

He had begun these in 1855, the second year of his appointment at the Royal School of Mines. On February 27 of that year he wrote to his friend Dr. Dyster:--

I enclose a prospectus of some People's Lectures (Popular Lectures I hold to be an abomination unto the Lord) I am about to give here. I want the working classes to understand that Science and her ways are great facts for them--that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest, not because fellows in black with white ties tell them so, but because these are plain and patent laws of nature which they must obey "under penalties."

I am sick of the dilettante middle class, and mean to try what I can do with these hard-handed fellows who live among facts.

And in May, after referring to his Preliminary Course and the earnestness and attention of his audience, he adds that he has begun his similar course to working men exclusively--a series of six, given in turn by each Professor:--

The theatre holds 600, and is crammed full. I believe in the fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I would willingly give some when I come to Tenby [Dr. Dyster's home].

Moreover, he took a practical interest in the corresponding movement set afoot by F.D. Maurice, and gave occasional addresses at the Working Men's College between 1857 and 1877, the last of which was that delightful discourse on science as "trained and organized common sense" which bears the alluring title of "The Method of Zadig."

POPULAR EDUCATION

These lectures to working men, no less than his profound interest and exhausting work on behalf of popular education, illustrate his intense belief that science is not solely a thing of the laboratory, but a vital factor in right living. It was still true that the people perish for want of knowledge. And as he said when talking of posthumous fame: "If I am to be remembered at all, I should like to be remembered as one who did his best to help the people."

Nor did he lack appreciation among those whom he tried thus to aid. Professor Mivart tells the following story:--

I recollect going [in 1874] with him and Mr. John Westlake, Q.C., to a meeting of artisans in the Blackfriars Road, to whom he gave a friendly address. He felt a strong interest in working men, and was much beloved by them. On one occasion, having taken a cab home, on his arrival there, when he held out his fare to the cabman, the latter replied: "Oh no, Professor; I have had too much pleasure and profit from hearing you lecture to take any money from your pocket; proud to have driven you, Sir!"

Another story is told by Mr. Raymond Blaythwayt:--

Only to-day I had a most striking instance of sentiment come beneath my notice. I was about to enter my house, when a plain, simply dressed working man came up to me with a note in his hand, and, touching his hat, he said: "I think this is for you, Sir"; and then he added: "Will you give me the envelope, Sir, as a great favour?" I looked at it, and, seeing it bore the signature of Professor Huxley, I replied: "Certainly I will; but why do you ask for it?" "Well," said he; "it's got Professor Huxley's signature, and it will be something for me to show my mates and keep for my children. He has done me and my like a lot of good; no man more."

In these special lectures of his very best and in his other essays, which, however far-reaching, were always intelligible to plain readers, may be seen one side of his desire to spread clear thinking among the less instructed masses; another was his work on the first School Board. By 1870 his health was already shaken by the heavy work which filled his days and nights; nevertheless, whatever the cost in time and labour and health, he felt it imperative to try, with all his power, to give rational shape to the new lines of universal education, and to revivify it with the fresh breath of the new renascence in aim and method. Science must be represented in the new Parliament of Education, and there was no one else ready to undertake the part. Moreover, he had already enjoyed some practical experience of the workings of elementary education while examiner under the Science and Art Department, the establishment of which he considered

a measure which came into existence unnoticed, but which will, I believe, turn out to be of more importance to the welfare of the people than many political changes over which the noise of battle has rent the air.

On the proper working of the new Act depended the physical, moral, and intellectual betterment of the nation; in particular, "book-learning" needed to be tempered with not merely handcraft, but with something of the direct knowledge of nature; for in itself, if properly applied, this is an admirable instrument of education, and by its method promotes an attitude of mind capable of understanding the reasons for the vast changes at work in human thought.

Accordingly, he stood as a candidate for Marylebone, and, without canvassing, for which he had neither time nor inclination, he was elected second on the list. He had addressed several meetings, and, as an amplification of his election address, he included extracts from his forthcoming article, "The School Boards: What They Can Do, and What They May Do," which were sent to the papers by the editor of the Contemporary Review. (See Coll. Ess., iii, 374.) Here was his programme, a great part of which he saw carried out:--Physical training, for health and as a basis for further training; Domestic training, especially for girls; Moral training, in a knowledge of moral and social laws, and an engaging of the affections for what is good instead of what is evil; Intellectual training, in knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge, alike for practical purposes and for recreation.

The opponents of popular education raised their still familiar outcry about "cramming children full of nonsense" and "unfitting them for the state of life to which they were called." But one cannot say what state of life they may be called to without opportunity of testing their capacities, and as for cramming them with nonsense, such a scheme, if properly carried out, ought rather to expel nonsense. Above all, it set the interests of humanity above the mere development of skill, which would simply turn the child of man into the subtlest beast of the field.