There are some compensations, I am beginning to think, in the reflection that by 1860 I was qualified, by age at least, to enjoy the spectacle of intellectual swordplay. In that year took place the famous encounter at Oxford between Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. It was one incident in a remarkable outburst of intellectual activity. The old controversy between scientific and ecclesiastical champions was passing into a new phase. Darwin's teaching had not only provided a fresh method, but suggested applications of scientific principles which widened and deepened the significance of the warfare. A "new reformation," as Huxley afterwards called it, was beginning, and the intellectual issues to be decided were certainly not less important than those which had presented themselves to Erasmus and Luther. In the struggle which followed Huxley took a leading part. He made original researches; he was the clearest expositor of the new doctrine to the exoteric world; he helped to organize the scientific teaching which might provide competent disciples or critics; and he showed most clearly and vigorously the bearing of his principles upon the most important topics of human thought. Whatever his success, the strongest antagonist could not deny to

him the praise due to a strenuous and honorable combatant. The most careless Gallio looking on from the outer ring might be roused to applaud the intellectual gladiator who could hit out so straight from the shoulder and fairly knock accomplished prelates out of time. Many could admire "Darwin's bulldog," as he called himself, even if they felt some sympathy with the bull whom he pinned. Those who watched him from first to last will be glad to make a more intimate acquaintance with so grand a specimen of the fighting qualities upon which Englishmen are supposed to pride themselves. In Mr. Leonard Huxley's volumes they will find ample materials for filling out the more obvious and strongly marked outlines; and will end by adding to their respect for the sturdy intellectual warrior a cordial affection for a noble and warm-hearted human being.

The method which Mr. L. Huxley has adopted was clearly prescribed for him. He has appreciated the conditions of his task, and fulfilled them with excellent judgment. The biographer can never quite equal the autobiographer, but with a sufficient supply of letters he may approximate very closely to the same result. Huxley's letters are fortunately abundant, and amount to a singularly clear, though

quite unconscious, self-revelation. The book, it is true, is of considerable dimensions, but, in the first place, Huxley had so many interests that many topics require notice; and, in the second place, the letters are almost uniformly excellent. The common complaint of the decay of letter-writing is partly answerable by the obvious consideration that most letters of our own time are still lying in their pigeonholes. It is true, no doubt, that only an Edward FitzGerald or so here and there has the chance to write letters breathing the old-world charm of lettered ease and playful dallying with the humorous aspects of life or books. Huxley's letters were necessarily thrown out at high pressure to give pithy statements of his judgment of some practical matter, or friendly greetings for which he can just find time between the lecture-room and the railway station. Their vivacity and constant felicity of phrase are the more remarkable. R. H. Hutton remarked quaintly upon the quantity of "bottled life" which Huxley could "infuse into the driest topic on which human beings ever contrived to prose." A more congenial phrase would perhaps be the amount of "potential energy" which was always stored in his brain. It is convertible at any moment into the activity of a steam-hammer hitting the nail on the head in the neatest and most effective fashion. There are none of the flabby, tortuous blunderings round about a meaning, nor of the conventional platitudes of which so many letters are entirely composed; every word is alive. His mother, he tells us, was remarkable for rapidity of thought. "Things flash across me," she would say by way of apology. That peculiarity, says her son "has been passed on to me in full strength;" and though it has "played him tricks," there is nothing with which he would less willingly part. The letters often

scintillate with such flashes, the brighter for the strong sense of humor which is rarely far beneath the surface. They vary from the simply playful to the deeply earnest moods. He does not scorn even atrocious puns. But of course it is not the occasional condescension to "goaks," as he calls them, but the fine perception of the comic side of serious matters which gives a charm to his casual phrases. Sometimes it shows itself in a bit of friendly "chaff." When Matthew Arnold has appropriated-unconsciously, let us hope-an umbrella at the Athenæum, Huxley slyly exhorts him to consider what that excellent prelate, Arnold's favorite Bishop Wilson, would have advised in a case of covetousness. An excellent example of grave logic conveyed in an apologue is the letter in answer to Cardinal Manning's defence of indiscriminate charity. Huxley had told an Irish carman to drive fast, and the man set off at a hand gallop. "Do you know where you are going?" cried Huxley. "No, yer honner, but anny way I'm driving fast!" A phrase in a letter to Mr. Clifford dashes out a quaint comment upon human nature. "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, are very hard to drive." This, says Mr. Leonard Huxley, sounds like a bit of his conversation; and in a very interesting description Sir Spencer Walpole remarks on that manifestation of his powers. Huxley, he says, "could always put his finger on the wrong word and always instinctively choose the right one." In private talk, lecturing and public speaking he was conspicuous in the humorous felicity which equally marks his admirable literary style.

"Science and literature," said Hux

ley, "are not two things, but two sides of one thing." An aphorism in an after-dinner speech must not be too literally construed, but the phrase indicates the quality which makes Huxley's writings as refreshing to the literary as to the scientific critic. "Exposition," he observes, "is not Darwin's forte. But there is a marvellous dumb sagacity about him like that of a sort of miraculous dog, and he gets to the truth by ways as dark as those of the Heathen Chinee." The final cause of Huxley might seem-though the theory is a little out of place-to have been the provision of an articulate utterance for Darwin's implicit logic. He points an old moral for young literary gentlemen in want of a style. He does not believe in moulding one's style by any other process than that of "striving after the expression of clear and definite conceptions." First, indeed, he adds, you have to catch your clear conceptions. I will not presume to say that for writers of a different category -Stevenson, for example-a different method may not be the right one. But most of us may heartily subscribe to Huxley's theory. The best way to be happy, as moralists tell us, is not to make the acquisition of happiness a conscious aim. To acquire a good style, you should never think of style at all. It will be the spontaneous outcome of adequate expression of clear thought. Some writers, Huxley admits, might have learnt dignity from a study of Hobbes, and concision from Swift, and simplicity from Defoe and Goldsmith. The names are significant of his taste; but he learnt by adopting the methods of his predecessors, not by imitating them as models. The labor which he bestowed upon his work is the more remarkable considering his quickness in seizing the right word in his hastiest letters. He speaks of writing essays half-a-dozen times before getting them into the right shape. He

had the passion, unfortunately rare in Englishmen, for thorough logical symmetry. His "flashes" must be finished and concentrated. The happy phrase has to be fixed in the general framework. Arguments are terribly slippery things. One is always finding oneself shunted into some slightly diverging track of thought; and brilliant remarks are most dangerous seducers. They illustrate something, but then it is not quite the right thing. Huxley gets his Pegasus into the strictest subordination; but one can understand that he had to suppress a good many swervings to right and left, and only found the lucid order after experimental wanderings into the wrong path. The result is the familiar one. What is easy to read has not, therefore, as the hasty reader infers, been easy to write. An "unfriendly" but surely rather simple-minded critic, declared that the interest of Huxley's lectures was due not to the lecturer, but to the simplicity of the theory expounded. That is the effect which Swift produces in the "Drapier's Letters." He seems to be simply stating obvious facts. Huxley's best essays deserve to be put on a level with the finest examples of Swift or other great literary athletes; and any one who imagines the feat to be easy can try the experiment.

Professor Ray Lankester, in describing this quality of Huxley's essays, points out how this implies a revelation of the man. When Swift's tracts purport to give an unvarnished statement of plain facts and figures, we are all the more sensible of the fierce indignation boiling just below the surface. Huxley's resolution to be strictly logical and to be clear before anything only forces him to exert his power of vivifying the subject by happy illustration or humorous side-lights, or sometimes by outbursts of hearty pugnacity, and now and then by the eloquent passages, the more effective be

cause under strict control, which reveal his profound sense of the vast importance of the questions at issue. He had one disadvantage as compared with Swift. If Swift wanted a fact he had not many scruples about Inventing it, whereas Huxley's most prominent intellectual quality was his fidelity to fact, or to what he was firmly convinced to be fact. This brings me to some characteristics strikingly revealed in these volumes. Huxley claims that he had always been animated by a love of truth combined with some youthful ambition. The claim, I think, is indisputable. Yet a love of truth must be considered, if I may say so, as rather a regulative than a substantive virtue. Abstract truth is a rather shadowy divinity, though a most essential guide in pursuing any great inquiry. Love of it presupposes an interest in philosophy or science or history, and then prescribes the right spirit of research. Huxley was not one of the rare men to whom abstract speculation is a sufficient delight in itself. He was most emphatically a human being, with strong affections and a keen interest in the human life around him. He had to live as well as to think, and to reconcile his intellectual ambition with hard necessities. The pith of his early story was already known in part from his autobiographical fragment. Further details make the picture more impressive. For a time he had to thrive under conditions which were only not blighting because his courage made them bracing. The school at which he got his brief training was a "pandemonium." He wished to be an engineer, but was forced to become a medical student against the grain. He found, however, a sufficient arena for the exercise of his awakening faculties. Physiology, the "engineering of living machines," attracted him, though he cared little for other parts of the necessary studies. From Carlyle he learnt a

hatred of "shams," or perhaps rather learnt to formulate an innate antipathy to that commodity. Carlyle, too, set him upon the study of German, afterwards invaluable, and suggested some early incursions into the field of metaphysics. A fortunate accident afterwards forced him to spend four years in the "Rattlesnake," where his personal accommodation, as he testifies, was not much better than Jonah's; where he had to pass months without seeing civilized beings, except the companions who were as indifferent as the Australian aborigines to scientific pursuits. He made friends of them not the less, and declares that the life on board ship, under sharp discipline, with a "soft plank" to sleep upon, and weevilly biscuit for breakfast, was well worth living. It taught him to work for the sake of work, even if he and his work were to go to the bottom of the sea. He returned to England to find that some of his work had been appreciated, and to gain some warm friends. Still, it looked as though a "life of science" would mean not a "life of poverty," but a "life of nothing," and the art of living upon nothing, especially with a family, had not yet been discovered. Yet the desirability of living somehow had been enforced by the greatest blessing of his life, the engagement in Australia to the lady to whom he writes this account. He still feels, however, and he counts with complete confidence upon her sharing his feeling, that he is bound for his own credit, for the sake of his friends, and of science itself, to keep his hand to the plough. How his persistence was rewarded, how he gradually emerged, secured in spite of vexatious delays a sufficient support to justify the long-delayed marriage and to carry on the task which he had accepted, may be read in these volumes. In later years the duties of a husband and a father forced him to take up the line