Thomas Henry Hurley,

1825-1895.

English scientists and certainly before him as a man of letters. Huxley began with the study of anatomy and surgery, and finally developed into a biologist in the broadest meaning of the term. Indeed, his researches were extended into almost every branch of science. He espoused Darwin's theory of natural selection, and with passionate earnestness of conviction and perhaps some inherent fondness for controversy, took every opportunity to impress his views upon the public and extend the acceptance of the new doctrines. He urged in particular the teaching of science in the schools. His first work to attract attention was his Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863). Among later volumes of importance was his Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (1870). His essays are now collected in nine volumes.

Huxley's style was energetic, like the man,-trenchant and vivid, admirably suited to the purpose it had to serve, though it would probably have proved more effective in the end had it possessed something of Matthew Arnold's milder tone. But Huxley had a difficult battle to wage, both with the forces that arrayed themselves against Arnold's gospel of culture, and to some extent with the forces which Arnold himself represented. Upon the former, the "Philistines," he spends his sharpest

sarcasm:

"I have used the past tense in speaking of the practical men— for although they were very formidable thirty years ago, I am not sure that the pure species has not been extirpated. In fact, so far as mere argument goes, they have been subjected to such a fire from the nether world that it is a miracle if any have escaped. But I have remarked that your typical practical man has an unexpected resemblance to one of Milton's angels. His spiritual wounds such as are inflicted by logical weapons, may be as deep as a well and as wide as a church-door, but beyond shedding a few drops of ichor, celestial or otherwise, he is no whit the worse."

But when he finds fault with the assumption that in the study of literature and the humanities is to be found the best criticism of life, and pleads for the equal recognition of scientific study,

he takes a more carefully argumentative, though never less confident, tone:

"The notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes, and that the chief business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly. Moreover this scientific criticism of life presents itself to us with different credentials from any other. It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime. The purely classical education advocated by the representatives of the Humanists in our day, gives no inkling of all this."

Solidly grounded in his patiently acquired facts, preaching a profounder reverence for truth than was possible before the advent of modern science, and equipped, as these quotations show, with no mean literary ability, Huxley entered the arena of nineteenth-century thought and, to the honor of both science and letters, carried off some of its proudest laurels.

CHAPTER XXI

THE LATER VICTORIANS

1860-1900

ROSSETTI MORRIS SWINBURNE PATER STEVENSON

The literature of the latter part of the nineteenth century scarcely followed the line of development that, from the character of the period, might have been expected. Huxley and his fellows, for example, did not by any means fight all the battles of science, and it is conceivable that their cause might have had a fuller vindication in some modern Areopagitica, had there been a Milton to pen it. But science soon grew too busy with its discoveries and the application of them to care very much about battles of opinion. Much the same thing was true of other dominant interests. The critical spirit continued rife, but this spirit seldom ministers to creative enthusiasm in itself or in others; certainly the later criticism brought forth no such celebrated exponents as Ruskin and Arnold. Perhaps the fiction of the time, when it shall be possible to take a final account of it, will be seen to have been in many aspects typical. It happens, however, that the single writer of fiction who can be included in our present treatment was as thorough-going a romanticist as any that lived a century before him. Instead of carrying us forward, Stevenson takes us back to Scott, and so affords another example of the failure of letters to follow closely the main currents of thought.

Turning to poetry, we find the case much the same. Only negatively, if at all, did it express the intellectual and progressive spirit of the age. For nearly all the poetry of a high order, to leave out of the account Tennyson and Browning, who still lived