The hero-worshippers who believe that the world is to be governed by its great men, who are to lead the little ones, justly if they can, but, if not, unjustly drive or kick them the right way, will sympathize with Mr. Eyre.

The other sect (to which I belong), who look upon hero-worship as no better than any other idolatry and upon the attitude of mind of the hero-worshipper as essentially immoral; who think it is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains; who look upon the observance of inflexible justice as between man and man as of far greater importance than even the preservation of social order, will believe that Mr. Eyre has committed one of the greatest crimes of which a person in authority can be guilty, and will strain every nerve to obtain a declaration that their belief is in accordance with the law of England.

People who differ on fundamentals are not likely to convert one another. To you, as to my dear friend Tyndall, with whom I almost always act, but who in this matter is as much opposed to me as you are, I can only say, let us be strong enough and wise enough to fight the question out as a matter of principle and without bitterness.

To Tyndall, whose convictions were bred in Ulster and fostered by an ardent devotion to Carlyle, he wrote in the same strain, apropos of a friend's banter on their sudden division:—

I replied to the jest earnestly enough—that I hoped and believed our old friendship was strong enough to stand any strain that might be put on it, much as I grieved that we should be ranged in opposite camps in this or any other case.

That you and I have fundamentally different political principles must, I think, have become obvious to both of us during the progress of the American War. The fact is made still more plain by your printed letter, the tone and spirit of which I greatly admire, without being able to recognize in it any important fact or argument which had not passed through my mind before I joined the Jamaica Committee.

Thus there is nothing for it but for us to agree to differ, each supporting his own side to the best of his ability and respecting his friend's freedom as he would his own, and doing his best to remove all petty bitterness from that which is at bottom one of the most important constitutional battles in which Englishmen have for many years been engaged.

If you and I are strong enough and wise enough, we shall be able to do this, and yet preserve that love for one another which I value as one of the good things of my life.

That public controversy could be conducted without loss of friendship he showed also in debate with Herbert Spencer. Their private encounters in argument were often very lively, for Spencer was a most tenacious disputant, to whom argument was as the breath of life.

It was probably after a meeting of the x Club, in the freedom of which debate was likely to be of the liveliest, that Spencer wrote accusing himself of losing his temper, and received the following reply:—

Your conscience has been treating you with the most extreme and unjust severity.

I recollect you looked rather savage at one point in our discussion, but I do assure you that you committed no overt act of ferocity; and if you had, I think I should have fully deserved it for joining in the ferocious onslaught we all made upon you.

What your sins may be in this line to other folk I don't know, but, so far as I am concerned, I assure you I have often said that I know no one who takes aggravated opposition better than yourself, and that I have not a few times been ashamed of the extent to which I have tried your patience.

So you see that you have what the Buddhists call a stock of accumulated merit, envers moi; and if you should ever feel inclined to "d—— my eyes," you can do so and have a balance left.

Seriously, my old friend, you must not think it necessary to apologize to me about any such matters, but believe me (d—ned or und—d),—Ever yours faithfully....

If he was comrade and brother among the friends of his own generation, he was a living inspiration to the friends of the next generation, especially to the pupils and teaching lieutenants who worked in close touch with him. His younger disciples always felt that in acute criticism and vast learning nobody surpassed him; but what they yet more admired than his learning was his wisdom. It was a delight to read an essay fresh from his pen, but an ever so much higher delight to hear him talk for five minutes. "His," says Professor Hubrecht, "was the most beautiful and the most manly intellect I ever knew of." The personal affection as well as admiration he inspired may be gathered from Sir E. Ray Lankester's words: "There has been no man or woman whom I have met in my journey through life whom I have loved and regarded as I have him, and I feel that the world has shrunk and become a poor thing now that his splendid spirit and delightful presence are gone from it." And Professor Jeffery Parker concludes his Recollections of his old chief with these words:—

Whether a professor is usually a hero to his demonstrator I cannot say; I only know that, looking back across an interval of many years and a distance of half the circumference of the globe, I have never ceased to be impressed with the manliness and sincerity of his character, his complete honesty of purpose, his high moral standard, his scorn of everything mean or shifty, his firm determination to speak what he held to be truth at whatever cost of popularity. And for these things "I loved the man, and do honour to his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any."

Indeed, his relations with his demonstrators were typical of his judgment of men, his distinction between the essential and the unessential, which made him a successful administrator.

To a new subordinate "The General," as he was always called, was rather stern and exacting; but when once he was convinced that his man was to be trusted, he practically let him take his own course; never interfered in matters of detail, accepted suggestions with the greatest courtesy and good humour, and was always ready with a kindly and humorous word of encouragement in times of difficulty. I was once grumbling to him about how hard it was to carry on the work of the laboratory through a long series of November fogs, "when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared." "Never mind, Parker," he said, instantly capping my quotation, "cast four anchors out of the stern and wish for day."

The first passport to his friendship was entire sincerity. Whatever other claims might be advanced, he would shut out from any approach to intimacy those whom he found to be untruthful or not straightforward. Naturally he did not offer any unnecessary encouragement to bores and dullards, but in his intercourse with these undesirables and wasters of his time he adopted none of the "offensive-defensive" methods of, say, Dr. Johnson or Lord Westbury. He armed himself with a cold correctitude of politeness, and lowered the social temperature instead of raising it.



XVII

IN THE FAMILY CIRCLE

His acquaintance and friendship were eagerly sought, and to those who entered the circle he gave abundantly of his brilliant gifts and of friendly affection; but the inmost circle was small—the men who were comrades and brothers; the sister and the brother united with him in love and trust; the wife to win whom he served so long, and without whose sustaining help and comradeship his quick spirit and nervous temperament could hardly have endured the long and often embittered struggle.

In this inmost circle he was at once strong and tender. The friend who most cordially admired his intellectual vigour and unflinching honesty could write after his death that—

what now dwells most in my mind is the memory of old kindness, and of the days when I used to see him with (his wife) and his children. I may safely say that I never came from your house without thinking how good he is; what a tender and affectionate nature the man has. It did me good simply to see him.

Always the home was the inmost centre of his own life. Here he found personal solace in his long struggle; the sympathy that was the pillar and stay of his genius, the twin incentive to labour and achievement, the warmth that gave a fuller value to the light he ensued. None knew more perfectly than himself what he owed to his life-long companion, who, in turn, was as much uplifted by his eager spirit as she was proud to be the cherisher of big aspirations and the active minister to his attainment. To her critical ear he gave the first reading of his essays; the judgment and the praise that he most valued were hers, and, as he put it towards the end of his life, when he was travelling with his son in Madeira and had been cut off from letters longer than he liked:—

Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been horridly anxious. Nobody—children or any one else—can be to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as wise in that as in other things.

Quick and keen-edged as he was, I cannot recall his ever losing his temper with any of us at home. Firm he was under his great tenderness for children; those nearest him felt a certain awe before the infallible force of his moral judgments; his arbitrament, though rarely invoked, was instant and final. Going out into the world afterwards, I think we did not fail to realize how different the home atmosphere must be where self-control does not rule, and the inevitable rubs of life find vent in irritable and ill-considered words.

It was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence that for the first fifteen or twenty years of his married life he had scarcely any time to devote to his children. The "lodger," as he used to describe himself, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes spare half-an-hour just before or just after dinner to draw wonderful pictures for the little ones, or on a Sunday he would now and then walk with the elder ones to Hampstead Heath or to the Zoo, where, as a constant visitant to the prosector's laboratory, he was a well-known figure, and admitted by the keepers to their arcana. But, while he often told us stories of the sea and of animals, he did not talk "shop" to us, as many people seemed to expect by their inquiries whether we did not receive quite a scientific education from his companionship.

At the same time, he was anything but a Bohemian. His inborn gaiety and high spirits, his humour and love of adventure, found from the first a balance in his love of science; and the rough experience of his early days intensified by contrast the spiritual serenity of united love. Lack of order, whether in mind or in outward surroundings, was no recommendation to him; and so far as the conventions represented in brief some valid results of social experience, he observed them and upheld them. They are not always dry husks out of which reason has evaporated. But where such were merely unreasoned custom, he was ready to set aside his mere likes and dislikes on good cause shown, and to follow reason as against the simple prejudice of custom, even his own.

On the whole, he made his impression on his children more by example than by spoken precept; much of his attitude may be gathered from a letter to his son on his twenty-first birthday:—

You will have a son some day yourself, I suppose, and, if you do, I can wish you no greater satisfaction than to be able to say that he has reached manhood without having given a serious anxiety, and that you can look forward with entire confidence to his playing the man in the battle of life. I have tried to make you feel your responsibilities and act independently as early as possible; but, once for all, remember that I am not only your father but your nearest friend, ready to help you in all things reasonable, and perhaps in a few unreasonable.

After he had retired from his professorial work and settled down at Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the advantage of his leisure. His natural love for children had scope for expression, and children themselves had an instinctive confidence in the power and sympathy that irradiated his face and gave his square, rugged features the beauty of wisdom and kindliness. He could captivate them alike by lively fun and excellent nonsense, and by lucid explanations of the wonders of the world about which children love to hear. He fired one small granddaughter with a love of astronomy, and one day a visitor, entering unexpectedly, was startled to find the pair of them kneeling on the floor of the entrance hall before a large sheet of paper, on which the professor was drawing a diagram of the solar system, with a little pellet and a big ball to represent earth and sun, while the child was listening with rapt attention to an account of the planets and their movements, which he knew so well how to make simple and precise without ever being dull.

One of the most charming unions of the playful and serious was his letter to the small boy, still under five, who was reading The Water Babies, wherein his grandfather's name is genially made fun of among the authorities on Water Babies and Water Beasts of every description. Moreover, there is a picture by Linley Sambourne, showing Huxley and Owen examining a bottled Water Baby under big magnifying glasses. Now, as the child greatly desired more light on the reality of Water Babies, here was an authority to consult. And, as he had already learned to write, he indited a letter of inquiry, first anxiously asking his mother if he would receive in reply a "proper letter" that he could read for himself, or a "wrong letter" that must be read to him. The hint bore fruit, and to his carefully pencilled epistle:

Have you seen a Water Baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day?

came a reply from his grandfather, neatly printed, letter by letter, very unlike the orderly confusion with which his pen usually rushed across the paper—to the great perplexity, often, of his foreign correspondents and sometimes of correspondents nearer home:—

I never could make sure about that Water Baby. I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles; but the Baby in the water was not in a bottle, and the Baby in the bottle was not in water.

My friend who wrote the story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the water as he did. There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.

When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers and see things more wonderful than Water Babies where other folks can see nothing.

There is a story of Mohammed that once, rather than disturb a favourite cat, he cut off the sleeve of his robe on which it lay asleep. Whether in like circumstances my father would have done the same—had flowing sleeves been a Victorian fashion—I cannot certainly say, though he once was found similarly dispossessed of his favourite study chair; but he always regarded this anecdote as displaying an agreeable trait in the Prophet. For he himself was very fond of animals, and, though we seldom kept dogs in London, cats were invariable members of the household. Apropos of these, a letter may be quoted which was written in 1893 in reply to an inquiry from a journalist who was collecting anecdotes for an article on the Home Pets of Celebrities:—

A long series of cats has reigned over my household for the last forty years, or thereabouts, but I am sorry to say that I have no pictorial or other record of their physical and moral excellences.

The present occupant of the throne is a large, young, grey Tabby—Oliver by name. Not that he is in any sense a protector, for I doubt whether he has the heart to kill a mouse. However, I saw him catch and eat the first butterfly of the season, and trust that this germ of courage, thus manifested, may develop with age into efficient mousing.

As to sagacity, I should say that his judgment respecting the warmest place and the softest cushion in a room is infallible; his punctuality at meal-times is admirable; and his pertinacity in jumping on people's shoulders, till they give him some of the best of what is going, indicates great firmness.



XVIII

SOME LETTERS AND TABLE TALK

My father's letters were seldom without a dash of playfulness or humour somewhere; a thing always fresh and spontaneous, unlike the calculated or laboured playfulness sometimes to be observed in the epistolary touch of literary folk. A capital example is a note to Matthew Arnold, at whose house he had left his umbrella. Arnold, it may be added, had recently been critically engaged upon the works of Bishop Wilson:—

Look at Bishop Wilson on the sin of covetousness, and then inspect your umbrella stand. You will there see a beautiful brown smooth-handled umbrella which is not your property.

Think of what the excellent prelate would have advised, and bring it with you next time you come to the Club. The porter will take care of it for me.

Sometimes the words will come trippingly from the pen as if they were flung out in a brilliant flash of talk, like the following sketch of human character:—

Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice—with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the posset—and when they can do exactly as they please they are very hard to drive.

As to his conversation, that, wrote the late Wilfrid Ward,

was singularly finished and (if I may so express it) clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid illustrations. He was an excellent raconteur, and his stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them always and everywhere acceptable. His sense of humour and economy of words would have made it impossible, had he lived to ninety, that they should ever have been disparaged as symptoms of what has been called "anecdotage."

Some fragments of his talk have been preserved by the same hand. Speaking of Tennyson's conversation, he said: "Doric beauty is its characteristic—perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything artificial."

Telling how he had been to a meeting of the British Museum Trustees, he said: "After the meeting Archbishop Benson helped me on with my greatcoat. I was quite overcome by this species of spiritual investiture. 'Thank you, Archbishop,' I said; 'I feel as if I were receiving the pallium.'"

On another occasion he drew a distinction between two writers, with neither of whom he sympathized. "Don't mistake me. One is a thinker and man of letters, the other is only a literary man. Erasmus was a man of letters; Gigadibs a literary man. A.B. is the incarnation of Gigadibs. I should call him Gigadibsius Optimus Maximus."

Of his quickness in rising to the occasion Professor Howes tells a story. Staying after a lecture to answer questions, he turned to a student and said: "Well, I hope you understood it all." "All, sir, but one part, during which you stood between me and the blackboard," was the reply; the rejoinder: "I did my best to make myself clear, but could not render myself transparent."

From among my own recollections I give the following:—"It is one of the most saddening things that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy." Of the attitude towards Spiritualism of a certain member of the Society for Psychical Research:—"He doesn't believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name. He is one of those people who talk of the 'possibility' of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct evidence in its favour."

Again:—"It is very strange how most men will do anything to evade responsibility." Later, we were talking of the contrast between Hellene and Hebrew. "The real chosen people," he said, "were the Greeks. One of the most remarkable things about them is not only the smallness but the late rise of Attica, whereas Magna Graecia flourished in the eighth century. The Greeks were doing everything—piracy, trade, fighting, expelling the Persians. Never was there so large a number of self-governing communities.

"They fell short of the Jews in morality. How curious is the tolerant attitude of Socrates, like a modern man of the world talking to a young fellow who runs after the girls. The Jew, however he fell short in other respects, set himself a certain standard in cleanliness of life, and would not fall below it. The more creditable to him, because these vices were the offspring of the Semitic races among whom the Jew lived.

"There is a curious similarity between the position of the Jew in ancient times and what it is now. They were procurers and usurers among the Gentiles, yet many of them were singularly high-minded and pure. All, too, with an intense clannishness, the secret of their success, and a sense of superiority to the Gentile which would prevent the meanest Jew from sitting at table with a pro-consul.

"The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstitions—his ideas of the supernatural. Jahveh was no more than Zeus or Milcom; yet the Jew got established the belief in the inspiration of his Bible and his law. If I were a Jew, I should have the same contempt as he has for the Christian who acted in this way towards me, who took my ideas and scorned me for clinging to them."

Here may be quoted a passage from a letter to Professor George Romanes:—

I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus—very little for later "Christianity." But the only religion that appeals to me is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from the best Stoics and something from Spinoza and something from Goethe, and there is a religion for men. Some of these days I think I will make a cento out of the works of these people.

This cento, however, he never made. Had he done so, he would assuredly have illustrated his saying to Charles Kingsley:—

My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact; not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations—

a notion expanded thus:—

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every pre-conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I resolved at all costs to do this.



PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO., JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET ST., LONDON, E.C.4.

THE END