4 May: Boreham on Thomas Huxley

Granite and Moss
On this, the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Huxley, an interesting question emerges. How many Huxleys were there? To the world at large he conveyed one impression: to his intimates he gave quite another. Those who know Beachy Head, on the lovely Sussex coast, will remember that it turns towards the sea a massive frowning face, grim as granite, that may well terrify any approaching mariner. But, on the landward side, it is a paradise of gently-undulating grassy downs, studded with poppies and buttercups. The personality of Huxley is very similar. He stands as one of those dominating and commanding figures in life and in literature that simply cannot be ignored. You may love him or hate him; you may applaud him or criticise him; but you are compelled to recognise him. He took a great deal of knowing; but those who possessed the patience to cultivate his friendship were abundantly rewarded for their pains.

He himself had a gruff habit of belittling his own discoveries. He glossed over them; made them appear insignificant; and engineered his self-depreciation so cleverly that even the elect were deceived. But, in his "Life of Huxley," Mr. Edward Clodd devotes thirty pages to the fruits of Huxley's own personal researches and concludes by apologising for the brevity of the summary. It would be easy, Mr. Clodd assures us, to fill a volume with an abbreviated account of Huxley's original work in biology alone. The secret behind the enigma is that Huxley was soured by the hardships and privations which tinged with bitterness his early days.

As Mr. Clodd makes clear, his boyhood was a bleak experience. He once told Charles Kingsley that he was kicked into the world, a boy without a guide or training, or with worse than none. He had, he said, two years of a pandemonium of a school, and, after that, neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till he reached manhood. And, even in those maturer days, sympathy was strangely coy.

The Bludgeonings Of Circumstance
Can history produce a love story more tantalising than his? When visiting these Southern lands as assistant surgeon on the Rattlesnake, Huxley fell in love with Miss Henrietta Heathorn of Sydney. But never did the course of true love run less smoothly. He won fame in England, but it brought him no money. Many years passed with all the oceans of the world rolling between him and his Australian sweetheart. And when, at long last, he was able to send for her, the doctors reported that she had not six months to live. "Six months or no," exclaimed Huxley, "she is going to be my wife!"

They were married; she lived to be nearly 90; surviving her illustrious husband by about 20 years. The years of storm and stress, of rankling bitterness and of cruel disappointment, left their scars upon his soul. To the end of his life—he died at 70—he appeared to superficial observers to be frigid and austere. He was said to be as cold as ice and as inflexible as steel. But those who really knew him smiled at such hasty judgments. For they had discovered that, behind that stern and forbidding exterior, there beat a heart that was singularly human.

His diary proves it. Take, for example, the entries concerning the brief life of his first boy. Huxley spent the last night of the year 1858 waiting to be told that he was a father. During those anxious hours he framed a characteristic resolution. In his journal he pledges himself, "to smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies and of toleration for everything but lying; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognised as mine or not so long as it is done. It is half-past ten at night. Waiting for my child, I seem to fancy it the pledge that all these things shall be." And the next entry runs: "Born five minutes before twelve: thank God!" Four years later, he makes another notable entry. He and little Noel had a great romp together: a few days afterwards the child died of scarlet fever. "On Saturday night I carried his cold, still body here into my study. Here, too, on Sunday, came his mother and I to that holy leavetaking. My boy is gone; but the dreams that filled my fancy at his birth have been fulfilled. I say heartily and without bitterness—Amen, so let it be!" It is the last entry in the diary: he had no heart to open it again.

Plea For Understanding And Reconciliation
These entries from the journal, and especially the closing phrase of each, prove conclusively that, deep in the soul of Huxley, there dwelt a wealth of feeling and of faith that very few people suspected. On one occasion, while engaged in a furious controversy with Mr. Gladstone, he startled all his readers by making a passionate plea for a better understanding between Religion and Science. "The antagonism between the two," he said, "appears to me to be purely fictitious. It is fabricated, on the one hand, by shortsighted religious people, and on the other, by shortsighted scientific people." And he declared that, whatever differences may arise between the exponents of Nature and the exponents of the Bible, there can never be any real antagonism between Science and Religion themselves.

All this goes to show that those who thought Huxley as cold as ice and as inflexible as steel had never taken the trouble to know him. For, as his biographer affirms, nobody could know him without loving him, and those who knew him best loved him most. Generous, therefore, as was the contribution that Huxley made to every department of scientific research, he best deserves to be remembered as a singularly pure minded and chivalrous man who was prepared to make any sacrifice to promote the happiness and wellbeing of his fellows.

F W Boreham

Image: Thomas Huxley