The Oxford business [he wrote to me in reply], lecture, dinner and all, was too much for me; and even after three or four days' rest in a quiet country house I collapsed on our way to another, and had to come straight home. Since my return I have been almost living in the garden, and otherwise most diligently idle. I read [your] chapter on the Metaphysical,' though, and was delighted with the saying that it died of too much love, attributed to me by such a competent witness that I am not going to dispute the fact, though I had utterly forgotten it.

I was quite sure you would agree with my main thesis (in the Romanes Lecture), for it is only the doctrine that Satan is the Prince of this world-from the scientific side.

Why should not materialists be transcendentalists? What possible difference can it make whether the hypostatised negative 'substance' is the same for mind and matter or different?

I am very sorry my cigar man served you so badly. I cannot make it out, as he invariably sends me the same quality. That confounded 'cosmic process' has got hold of him.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T. H. HUXLEY.

I have said that his conversation had the widest range. Point and humour were always there. If he spoke of persons or scenes, you carried away some definite feature of the personality or events in question.

I well remember his description-given with true Yankee twang -of a lecture he had to deliver at New York, where he was received with great enthusiasm. The reporters of the Baltimore paper called on him, and said they must have the lecture for publication on the day of its delivery. Huxley explained that the lecture existed as yet only in his own head. Still they pressed for it, and he complied with their demand, stipulating that if he rehearsed it for them they must give him a copy, lest they should publish one lecture and he should give another. The rehearsal was made, and the copy sent; but when he opened it-in the very Lecture Hall itself-it proved to be a wholly illegible transcript on tissue paper. To make the story perfect he ought to have delivered an entirely different lecture from the one reported; but his excellent memory served him, and the reports of the actual lecture and of the rehearsal, although somewhat different, were not sufficiently so to betray what had occurred.

I felt my impression of Carlyle's dogged Scotch unsympathetic persistency in measuring everything by his own ideas sensibly deepened by a story which Huxley told me of their mutual relations. Carlyle and he were for long good friends, but had a serious difference on the evolution question in the early stages of the controversy. Their personal intercourse ceased in consequence. After an interval of many years Huxley happened to see the Scotchman crossing the street in London, and thinking that bygones might be bygones, went up to him and spoke to him. Carlyle did not at first recognise him, but when he had made out who it was, he at once said, In W. G. Ward and the Catholic Revival (Macmillan). VOL. XL-No. 234

U

with his Scotch twang, as though he were continuing the last conver sation of years ago, You're Huxley, are you? You're the man that's trying to persuade us all that we're the children of apes; while I am saying that the great thing we've really got to do is to make ourselves as much unlike apes as possible.' Huxley, who had hoped that the weather or politics might have been admitted for the sake of peace, soon found that the best thing he could do was to retreat, and return to their tacit agreement to differ.

So, too, Stanley's impressionable and imaginative nature was brought out by him in an anecdote. Stanley, vividly impressed by the newest thought of the hour, liberal, and advanced by family and school tradition, had sympathised with Colenso's treatment of the Bible in some degree; yet his historical impressionableness told the other way. Huxley explained his position thus :

'Stanley could believe in anything of which he had seen the supposed site, but was sceptical where he had not seen. At a breakfast at Monckton Milnes's, just at the time of the Colenso row, Milnes asked me my views on the Pentateuch, and I gave them. Stanley differed from me. The account of creation in Genesis he dismissed at once as unhistorical; but the call of Abraham, and the historical narrative of the Pentateuch, he accepted. This was because he had seen Palestine-but he wasn't present at the Creation.'

Admirably did he once characterise Tennyson's conversation. Doric beauty is its characteristic-perfect simplicity, without any ornament or anything artificial.' Of an eminent person whose great subtlety of mind was being discussed, he said that the constant overrefinement of distinctions in his case destroyed all distinctness. Anything could be explained away, and so one thing came to mean the same as its opposite. Some one asked, 'Do you mean that he is untruthful?' 'No,' replied Huxley, he is not clear-headed enough to tell a lie.'

One of the subjects of his enthusiasm was John Bright—his transparent sincerity, his natural distinction, his oratorical power. 'If you saw him and A. B.' (naming a well-known nobleman) 'together,' he said, 'you would have set down Bright as the aristocrat, and the other as the plebeian. His was the only oratory which ever really held me. His speeches were masterpieces. There was the sense of conviction in them, great dignity, and the purest English.'

He once spoke strongly of the insight into scientific method shown in Tennyson's In Memoriam, and pronounced it to be 'quite equal to that of the greatest experts.' Tennyson he considered the greatest English master of melody except Spenser and Keats. I told him of Tennyson's insensibility to music, and he replied that it was curious that scientific men as a rule had more appreciation of music than poets or men of letters. He told me of one long talk he had

had with Tennyson, and added that immortality was the one dogma to which Tennyson was passionately devoted.

Of Browning, Huxley said: 'He really has music in him. Read his poem, The Thrush, and you will see it. Tennyson said to me,' he added, that Browning had plenty of music in him, but he could not get it out.'

A few more detached remarks illustrate the character and tastes of the man. He expressed once his delight in Switzerland and in the beauty of Monte Generoso. There is nothing like Switzerland,' he said. But I also delight in the simplest rural English scenery. A country field has before now entranced me.' 'One thing,' he added, which weighs with me against pessimism, and tells for a benevolent Author of the universe, is my enjoyment of scenery and music.

I do not see how they can have helped in the struggle for existence. They are gratuitous gifts.'

He enjoyed greatly the views within his reach at Eastbourne, and his enjoyment was stimulated by the constitutional walk which took him frequently up the downs. The incubus of thought is got rid of,' he said, if you walk up a hill and walk fast.' He was eloquent on the beauty of Beachy Head. 'Building at Eastbourne is one of the few prudent things I ever did. It contradicts the proverb, "Fools build houses for wise men to live in."

He spoke of the Royal Commission on Vivisection. The general feeling was at first strongly for vivisection,' he said, 'but one German changed the current of opinion by remarking, "I chloroform a cat because it scratches, but not a dog." This at once suggested possibilities of cruelty, and (as I understood) was the cause of the amount of restriction ultimately placed on the practice. Apropos of vivisection, he spoke strongly of the absurdity of the outcry against it, as long as such things as pigeon-shooting were tolerated for mere amusement.

Speaking of two men of letters, with neither of whom he sympathised, he once said, 'Don't mistake me; I don't class them together. 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. When I showed him the various accounts of the Metaphysical Society which had been sent to me, and which revealed certain discrepancies, he said, 'Don't get any more, or the German critics will prove conclusively that it never existed.' Characteristic, too, was his genial pleasure in telling us how his little granddaughter looked at him, and then said emphatically, 'Well, you're the curiousest old man I ever saw.'

My talks with him during the last year of his life were almost entirely connected with the philosophy of religious Faith. In 1894 I introduced to him a young friend of mine, an Oxford man, who

lived in Eastbourne. On this occasion he was very eloquent in Bishop Butler's praise, and on the conclusiveness of his argument in the Analogy as far as it went. But Butler was really one of us,' he added. That halting style, that hesitancy in expression, show that he was looking for a conclusion-something which he had not yet found.' My friend remarked that Newman thought that that something was Catholicism, and that Newman had developed Butler in a Catholic sense. 'A most ingenious developer,' replied Huxley, with amused emphasis.

He went up to Oxford for the meeting of the British Association, and I saw him shortly after his return. The whole thing had tired him very much, but the enthusiastic reception he had met with evidently gratified him. He criticised Lord Salisbury's address, in which he had spoken of the argument from design, and had attacked Weismann for ruling it out of court.

'After all [Huxley continued] my predominant feeling was one of triumph. I recalled the last meeting of the British Association at Oxford in the sixties, when it was supposed to be downright atheism to accept evolution at all, and when Bishop Wilberforce turned to me in public and said, "Was it your grandfather or your grandmother, Mr. Huxley, who was an ape?" And now Lord Salisbury, though he ventured to attack us, did not venture to question the doctrine of evolution-the thing for which he had really been struggling.'

He was highly pleased with an article on him which appeared in January 1895 in the Quarterly. It made me feel quite young again,' he said. 'It is a strong attack, of course, but very well written. I know a good bit of work when I see it.' He recurred several times to this article, and the significance of his pleasure struck me when I came to read it. For, like the Romanes Lecture, the article emphasised that side of Huxley's teaching which was consistent with the Theistic view of life-a side so often ignored by his critics. I have been attacked all my life,' he added, 'but so are many better men than me. Those whose views ultimately triumph often go through the most obloquy in their own time.'

There is a sad interest in the last scenes of the life of a man of genius which will be sufficient excuse for describing in some detail the last long conversation which I had with Mr. Huxley. Someone had sent me Mr. A. J. Balfour's book on Foundations of Belief early in February 1895. We were very full of it, and it was the theme of discussion on the 17th of February, when two friends were lunching with us. Not long after luncheon Huxley came in, and seemed in extraordinary spirits. He began talking of Erasmus and Luther, expressing a great preference for Erasmus, who would, he said, have impregnated the Church with culture and brought it abreast of the thought of the times, while Luther concentrated attention on individual mystical doctrines. 'It was very trying for

Erasmus to be identified with Luther, from whom he differed absolutely. A man ought to be ready to endure persecution for what he does hold; but it is hard to be persecuted for what you don't hold.' I said that I thought his estimate of Erasmus's attitude towards the Papacy coincided with Professor R. C. Jebb's. He asked. if I could lend him Jebb's Rede Lecture on the subject. I said that I had not got it at hand, but I added, 'I can lend you another book which I think you ought to read-Balfour's Foundations of Belief.'

6

He at once became extremely animated, and spoke of it as those who have read his criticisms, published in the following month, would expect. You need not lend me that. I have exercised my mind with it a good deal already. Mr. Balfour ought to have acquainted himself with the opinions of those he attacks. One has no objection to being abused for what one does hold, as I said of Erasmus-at least, one is prepared to put up with it. An attack on us by some one who understood our position would do all of us good-myself included. But Mr. Balfour has acted like the French in 1870-he has gone to war without any ordnance maps, and without having surveyed the scene of the campaign. No human being holds the opinions he speaks of as "naturalism." He is a good debater. He knows the value of a word. The word "naturalism" has a bad sound and unpleasant associations. It would tell against us in the House of Commons, and so it will with his readers. "Naturalism" contrasts with " naturalism." He has not only attacked us for what we don't hold, but he has been good enough to draw out a catechism for "us wicked people" to teach us what we must hold.'

super

It was rather difficult to get him to particulars, but we did so by degrees. He said, 'Balfour uses the word phenomena as applying simply to the outer world and not to the inner world. The only people whom his attack would hold good of would be the Comtists, who deny that psychology is a science. They may be left out of account. They advocate the crudest eighteenth-century materialism. All the empiricists, from Locke onwards, make the observation of the phenomena of the mind itself quite separate from the study of mere sensation. No man in his senses supposes that the sense of beauty, or the religious feelings [this with a courteous bow to a priest who was present], or the sense of moral obligation, are to be accounted for in terms of sensation, or come to us through sensation.' I said that, as I understood it, I did not think Mr. Balfour supposed they would acknowledge the position he ascribed to them, and that one of his complaints was that they did not work out their premises to their logical conclusions. I added that so far as one of Mr. Balfour's chief points was concerned-the existence of the external world-Mill was almost the only man on their side in this century who had faced the problem frankly, and he had been driven to say that all men can know is that there are 'permanent possibilities of sensation.' He