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Page 17
A notable description of his public lecturing in the seventies and
early eighties is given by G. W. Smalley, correspondent of the _New
York Tribune_, in his "London Letters":--
[Illustration: From a Photograph by Maull and Polyblank, 1857; To face
p. 44]
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.
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