The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol 1 | Page 4

horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning
woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, the swarm
might have settled on my lips, and I should have been endowed with
that mellifluous eloquence which, in this country, leads far more surely
than worth, capacity, or honest work, to the highest places in Church
and State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to
content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of
plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to
a man's prospects of advancement."
As to his debt, physical and mental, to either parent, he writes as
follows:--]
Physically I am the son of my mother so completely--even down to
peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me
as I reached the age she had when I noticed them--that I can hardly find
any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing,
which, unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot
temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly
observers sometimes call obstinacy.
My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic
temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw
in a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the
middle classes of her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her
most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If
one ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive at

any conclusion, she would say, "I cannot help it; things flash across
me." That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has
often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks,
and it has always been a danger. But, after all, if my time were to come
over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my
inheritance of mother-wit.
[Restless, talkative, untiring to the day of her death, she was at sixty-six
"as active and energetic as a young woman." His early devotion to her
was remarkable. Describing her to his future wife he writes:--]
As a child my love for her was a passion. I have lain awake for hours
crying because I had a morbid fear of her death; her approbation was
my greatest reward, her displeasure my greatest punishment.
I have next to nothing to say about my childhood (he continues in the
Autobiography). In later years my mother, looking at me almost
reproachfully, would sometimes say, "Ah! you were such a pretty boy!"
whence I had no difficulty in concluding that I had not fulfilled my
early promise in the matter of looks. In fact, I have a distinct
recollection of certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction
that I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert
Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a god to us
country folk, because he was occasionally visited by the then Prince
George of Cambridge. I remember turning my pinafore wrong side
forwards in order to represent a surplice, and preaching to my mother's
maids in the kitchen as nearly as possible in Sir Herbert's manner one
Sunday morning when the rest of the family were at church. That is the
earliest indication of the strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr.
Herbert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have
for the most part remained in a latent state.
[There remains no record of his having been a very precocious child.
Indeed, it is usually the eldest child whose necessary companionship
with his elders wins him this reputation. The youngest remains a child
among children longer than any other of his brothers and sisters.
One talent, however, displayed itself early. The faculty of drawing he
inherited from his father. But on the queer principle that training is
either unnecessary to natural capacity or even ruins it, he never
received regular instruction in drawing; and his draughtsmanship,
vigorous as it was, and a genuine medium of artistic expression as well

as an admirable instrument in his own especial work, never reached the
technical perfection of which it was naturally capable.
The amount of instruction, indeed of any kind, which he received was
scanty in the extreme. For a couple of years, from the age of eight to
ten, he was given a taste of the unreformed public school life, where,
apart from the rough and ready mode of instruction in vogue and the
necessary obedience enforced to certain rules, no means were taken to
reach the boys themselves, to guide them and help them in their school
life. The new-comer was left to struggle for himself in