He was
masculine in everything--look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture,
sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art,
he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in
oratory or whatever else--he had simplicity."
Simplicity, directness, sincerity,--all these qualities describe Huxley;
but the one attribute which distinguishes him above all others is love
of truth. A love of truth, as the phrase characterizes Huxley, would
necessarily produce a scholarly habit of mind. It was the zealous search
for truth which determined his method of work. In science, Huxley would
"take at second hand nothing for which he vouched in teaching." Some one
reproached him for wasting time verifying what another had already done.
"If that is his practice," he commented, "his work will never live." The
same motive made him a master of languages. To be able to read at first
hand the writings of other nations, he learned German, French, Italian,
and Greek. One of the chief reasons for learning to read Greek was to
see for himself if Aristotle really did say that the heart had only
three chambers--an error, he discovered, not of Aristotle, but of the
translator. It was, moreover, the scholar in Huxley which made him
impatient of narrow, half-formed, foggy conclusions. His own work has
all the breadth and freedom and universality of the scholar, but it has,
also, a quality equally distinctive of the scholar, namely, an infinite
precision in the matter of detail.
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