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Page 9
At last the gleams of promise, which had begun to gather, broke
through the clouds. On the sudden death of Professor Jamieson, his
good friend Edward Forbes was called away in the spring of 1854 to
take the Edinburgh professorship. At a few days' notice Huxley was
lecturing as Forbes's substitute at the Royal School of Mines. In July
he was appointed permanently, with a salary for his course of �100
a year. A few days later his income was doubled. Forbes had held two
lectureships; the man who had accepted the other drew back, and it
was given to Huxley. In August he was "entrusted with the Coast Survey
Investigations under the Geological Survey," becoming the regular
Naturalist to the Survey the following year, with pay of �200,
afterwards increased to �400, rising to �600. The way was clear; the
Heathorn family had already determined to come home. Miss Heathorn had
been very ill; she was still far from strong, and, indeed, one gloomy
doctor only gave her six months to live. The lover defied him: "I
shall marry her all the same;" but the gloomy doctor was alone in his
opinion, and, indeed, she lived till she was nearly eighty-nine. The
marriage, which was to bring so much active happiness in a life of
much struggle and stress, was celebrated on July 1, 1855. They had
become engaged at twenty-two; they had waited and striven for eight
years; they were rewarded by forty years of mutual love and support.
V
LEHRJAHRE
The award of the Royal Medal was felt by Huxley to be a turning-point.
It was something which convinced the "practical" people who used to
scoff at his "dreamy" notions, and brought them to urge him on a more
"dreamy" course than ever he dreamed of. "However," he remarks, "I
take very much my own course now, even as I have done before--Huxley
all over." Without being blinded by any vanity, he saw in the award
and the general estimate in which it was held a finger-post showing
as clearly as anything can what was the true career lying open before
him. Ambitious in the current sense of worldly success he was not. The
praise of men stirred a haunting mistrust of their judgment and his
own worthiness. Honours he valued as evidences of power; but no more.
What possessed him was, as he confessed in a letter meant only for
the eye of his future wife, "an enormous longing after the highest and
best in all shapes--a longing which haunts me and is the demon which
ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing
his behests." With the sense of power stirring within him, he
refused to be beholden to any man. Patronage he abhorred in an ago
of patronage. He was ready to accept a helping hand from any one who
thought him capable of forwarding the great cause in ever so small a
way; but on no other terms. If the time had come to speak out on any
matter, he was resolved to let no merely personal influence restrain
him. He cared only for the praise or blame of the understanding few.
Whatever the popular judgment, he knew there was a work to be done and
that he had power to do it; and this was his personal ambition--to
do that work in the world, and to do it without cant and humbug and
self-seeking. Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he
confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of "her
boy"; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet
surely in no mere spirit of boasting. He "left his mark somewhere,
clear and distinct," without taint of the insincerities which he had
an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of his own.
It was not every one who could dare to range so far and wide as Huxley
did from the original line of investigation he had taken up. Friends
warned him against what appeared to be a scattering of his energies.
If he devoted himself to that morphology of the Invertebrates in which
his new and illuminating conceptions had promptly earned the Royal
Medal, he would easily be the first in his field. But what he did was
in great part of set purpose. He was no mere collector of specimens,
no mere describer of species. He sought the living processes which
determined natural groups; the theories he formed needed verification
in various directions. These excursions from the primary line of
research were of great value in broadening the basis of his knowledge.
He also deliberately set aside the years 1854-60 as a period in which
to make himself master of the branches of science cognate to his own,
so that he should be ready for any special pursuits in any of them.
For he did not know what was to be his task after the work that had
fallen to him, not of his own choice, at the School of Mines. He was
to ground himself in each department by monographic work, and by
1860 might fairly look forward to fifteen or twenty years of
"Meisterjahre," when, with the comprehensive views arising from such
training, it should be possible to give a new and healthier direction
to all biological science. Meanwhile, opportunities must be seized at
the risk of a reputation for desultoriness.
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