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Page 32
Herein lay the secret of his lucidity. Uniting the scientific habit
of mind with the literary art, he showed that truthfulness need not
be bald, and that power lies rather in accuracy than in luxuriance of
diction. As to the influence which such a style exerted on the habit
of mind of his readers, there is remarkable testimony in a letter from
Spedding, the editor of Bacon, printed in the _Life of Huxley_, ii,
239. Spedding, his senior by a score of years, describes the influence
of Bacon on his own style in the matter of exactitude, the pruning
of fine epithets and sweeping statements, the reduction of numberless
superlatives to positives, and asserts that if, as a young man, he
had fallen in with Huxley's writings before Bacon's, they would have
produced the same effect upon him.
Huxley's own criticism of the one and only poem be ever published
is also instructive. On his way back from the funeral of Tennyson in
Westminster Abbey, he spent the journey in shaping out some lines on
the dead poet, the germ of which had come into his mind in the Abbey.
These, with a number of other tributes to Tennyson by professed poets,
were printed in the _Nineteenth Century_ for November, 1892. He writes
in a private letter:--
If I were to pass judgment upon it in comparison with the
others, I should say that as to style it is hammered, and as
to feeling, human.
They are castings of much prettier pattern and of mainly
poetico-classical educated-class sentiment. I do not think
there is a line of mine one of my old working-class audience
would have boggled over.
As regards the arts other than literary, he had a keen eye for a
picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtman's
and anatomist's sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour. To
good music, also, he was always susceptible; as a young man he used to
sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong. In music,
as in painting, he was untrained. Yet, as has been noted already, his
illustrations to MacGillivray's _Voyage of the Rattlesnake_ and his
holiday sketches suggest that he might have gone far had he been
trained as an artist.
When first married he used to set aside Saturday afternoons to take
his wife to the Ella concerts, fore-runners of the "Saturday Pops.,"
but it was not very long before the pressure of circumstance forbade
this pleasure. Later, he very occasionally managed to go to the
theatre; but his chief recreation, apart from change of work and the
rapid devouring of a good novel, was in meeting his friends, when
occasion offered, at the scientific societies or at dinner, or now
and then in country visits which had not yet received the name of
"week-ends."
When, in the middle seventies, his position was firmly established and
he was living in a roomy house, No. 4 Marlborough Place, St. John's
Wood, there were gatherings of friends on Sunday evenings. An informal
meal awaited the guests, who came either on a general invitation or
when specially bidden; others put in an appearance later. There would
be much talk, from grave to gay, in those plainly appointed rooms, or
on a fine summer evening, perhaps, in the garden with its little lawn
behind the house. Some music, too, was almost sure to be performed by
friends or by the daughters of the house, whose progress in the art of
singing was ever a matter of concern to Mr. Herbert Spencer, himself
a great lover of music. Letters and Art were well represented there
as well as Science, intermingled with the friends of the younger
generation. "Here," writes G.W. Smalley,
people from many other worlds than those of abstract science
were bidden; where talk was to be heard of a kind rare in
any world. It was scientific at times, but subdued to the
necessities of the occasion; speculative, yet kept within such
bounds that bishop or archbishop might have listened without
offence; political even, and still not commonplace, and, when
artistic, free from affectation.
There and elsewhere Mr. Huxley easily took the lead if he
cared to, or if challenged. Nobody was more ready in a greater
variety of topics, and if they were scientific it was almost
always another who introduced them. Unlike some of his
comrades of the Royal Society, he was of opinion that man does
not live by science alone, and nothing came amiss to him....
Even in private the alarm of war is sometimes heard, and Mr.
Huxley is not a whit less formidable as a disputant across
the table than with pen in hand. Yet an angry man must be very
angry indeed before he could be angry with this adversary. He
disarmed his enemies with an amiable grace that made defeat
endurable, if not entirely delightful.
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