THE SHAH OF PERSIA IN ENGLAND. By Professor Vambéry THE MYSTERY OF MONSIEUR REGNIER. By Archibald Forbes IMPROVEMENT OF IRISH HUNTERS. By Frederick Wrench 963 WOMEN AS OFFICIAL INSPECTORS. By Miss Louisa Twining IN THE MOUNTAINS OF EGYPT. By E. N. Buxton 1. AN UNFAIR PENALTY ON PEERS. By the Hon. St. John Brodrick, the Hon. George N. Curzon, and Lɔrd Wolmer 2. REFORM BY 'RESOLUTION.' By Professor Goldwin Smith THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRADES UNION VOTE. By Frederick Wicks REALISM OF TO-DAY. By the Countess Cowper EARLY SOCIAL SELF-GOVERNMENT. By Sir John Simon PROFESSOR SAYCE ON THE HIGHER CRITICISM' By Professor Cheyne THE COW AGITATION, OR THE MUTINY-PLASM IN INDIA. By Oday Pertap THE LOVE ODES OF HORACE (FIVE SPECIMENS). By W. E. Gladstone SHALL INDIAN PRINCES SIT IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS? By the Earl of 710 (United States Consul, Birmingham) INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS IN THE UNITED STATES. By George F. Parker SIMON RYAN THE PETERITE. (Concluded.) By the Rev. • THE NEW AND THE OLD ART CRITICISM. By Mrs. Costelloe THE QUEEN AND LORD PALMERSTON. By Reginald B. Brett CHECKS ON DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA By George Washburn Smalley INDIA: THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK. By Sir George Chesney ART AT THE SALONS. By Charles Whibley PEDIGREES OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN HORSES. By James Irvine Lupton 922 A RECENT RUN TO THE EAST. By Lord Brassey THE NINETEENTH CENTURY No. CCIII-JANUARY 1894 PROFESSOR TYNDALL PERSONAL, like national, history has its epochs; brief seasons, during which life is fuller than usual, and the present is more obviously pregnant with the future than at other times. For me, the year 1851 constitutes such an epoch. In November 1850, I had returned to England after an absence, which not only extended over a considerable period of time, but covered the critical age of transition from adolescence to full manhood. In the course of these four years, largely spent in little-explored regions of the other side of the globe, I had been in the world as well as round it, and stored up varied experiences of things and men. Moreover, I had done some bits of scientific work which, as I was pleasantly surprised to learn on my return, were better thought of than I had, I will not say expected, but ventured to hope, when I sent them home; and they provided me with an introduction to the scientific society of London. I found the new world, into which I thus suddenly dropped, extremely interesting, and its inhabitants kindly disposed towards the intruder. The veterans were civil, the younger men cordial; and it speedily dawned upon my mind that I had found the right place for myself, if I could only contrive to stop in it. As time went on, I acted upon this conviction; and, fortune greatly aiding effort, the end of it was thirty odd years of pretty hard toil, partly as an investigator and teacher in one branch of natural knowledge, and partly as a halfvoluntary, half compelled man-of-all-work for the scientific household in general. * But the year 1851 has other and even stronger claims to be WOL. XXXV-No. 203 B counted an era in my existence. In the course of the twelve months after my return, I made acquaintances which rapidly ripened into friendships, knit with such strong bonds of mutual affection and mutual respect, that neither the ordinary vicissitudes of life, nor those oppositions in theory and practice which will arise among men of mental constitutions diverse in everything but strength of will, nor, indeed, any power short of almighty Death, has been able to sunder them from that time to this. And among those friends who, as the years rolled on, mir so oft In Noth und Trübsal beigestanden, to whom, indeed, I have found the old shikaree's definition of a friend, as a man with whom you can go tiger-hunting,' strictly applicable, almost the earliest was John Tyndall. My elder by some five years, Tyndall's very marked and vigorous personality must have long taken its final set when we foregathered in 1851. The dyer's hand is subdued to that it works in; and, it may be, that much occupation with types of structure, elsewhere, is responsible for a habit of classifying men to which I was, and am, given. But I found my new friend a difficult subject-incerta sedis, as the naturalists say; in other words, hard to get into any of my pigeon-holes. Before one knew him well, it seemed possible to give an exhaustive definition of him in a string of epigrammatic antitheses, such as those in which the older historians delight to sum up the character of a king or leading statesman. Impulsive vehemence was associated with a singular power of self-control and a deepseated reserve, not easily penetrated. Free-handed generosity lay side by side with much tenacity of insistence on any right, small or great; intense self-respect and a somewhat stern independence, with a sympathetic geniality of manner, especially towards children, with whom Tyndall was always a great favourite. Flights of imaginative rhetoric, which amused (and sometimes amazed) more phlegmatic people, proceeded from a singularly clear and hard-headed reasoner, over-scrupulous, if that may be, about keeping within the strictest limits of logical demonstration; and sincere to the core. A bright and even playful companion, Tyndall had little of that quick appreciation of the humorous side of things in general, and of one's self in particular, which is as oil to the waves of life, and is a chief component of the worthier kind of tact; indeed, the best reward of the utterer of a small witticism, or play upon words, in his presence, was the blank, if benevolent, perplexity with which he received it. And I suppose that the character-sketch would be incomplete, without an explanation of its peculiarities by a reference to the mixture of two sets of hereditary tendencies, the one eminently Hibernian, the other derived from the stock of the English Bible translator and Reformer. To those who have been privileged to become intimate with Tyndall, however, sketch and explanation will seem alike inadequate. These superficial characteristics disappeared from view, as the powerful faculties and the high purposes of the mind, on the surface of which they played, revealed themselves. And to those who knew him best, the impression made by even these great qualities might well be less vivid than that left by the warmth of a tenderly affectionate nature. 'If I pull through this it will be all your care, all your doing.' These words (I give them from memory), uttered the night before his death, were meant for no ear but that of the tireless nurse, watcher, secretary, servant, in case of need, to whom they were addressed; and whose whole life had been, for many years, devoted to the one object of preserving that of her husband. Utterly hateful to me as are the violations of a privacy that should be sacred, now too common, I have sought and obtained permission to commit this, and take all responsibility for it. For the pitiful circumstances of Tyndall's death are known to all the world; and I think it well that all the world should be enabled to see those circumstances by the light which shines forth, alike on the dead and on the living, from the poor crumpled piece of paper on which these treasured words were, at once, recorded. But I have wandered far from the year 1851 and its nascent friendships. At that time, Tyndall and I had long been zealous students of Carlyle's works. Sartor Resartus and the Miscellanies were among the few books devoured partly by myself, and partly by the mighty hordes of cockroaches in my cabin, during the cruise of the Rattlesnake; and my sense of obligation to their author was then, as it remains, extremely strong. Tyndall's appreciation of the seer of Chelsea was even more enthusiastic; and, in after-years, assumed a character of almost filial devotion. The grounds of our appreciation, however, were not exactly the same. My friend, I think, was disposed to regard Carlyle as a great teacher; I was rather inclined to take him as a great tonic; as a source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus and refreshment, rather than of theoretical or practical guidance. Half a century ago, the evangelical reaction which, for a time, had braced English society was dying out, and a scum of rotten and hypocritical conventionalism clogged art, literature, science, and politics. I might quarrel with something every few paragraphs, but passing from the current platitudes to Carlyle's vigorous pages was like being transported from the stucco, pavement, and fog of a London street to one of his own breezy moors. The country was full of boulders and bogs, to be sure, and by no means calculated for building leases; but, oh the freshness and the freedom of it! Our divergent appreciation of Carlyle foreshadowed the only serious strain to which our friendship was ever exposed. When the old Cavalier and Roundhead spirit woke up all over England about the Jamaica revolt and Governor Eyre, I am afraid that, if things had been pushed to extremities over that unfortunate business, each of us would have been capable of sending the other to the block. But the sentence would have been accompanied by assurances of undiminished respect and affection; and I have faith that we should not have spoiled our lives by quarrelling over the inevitable. Carlyle's extraordinary peculiarities of style, even at his worst, were not, to me, the stumbling-blocks which they often proved to other people, who, in their irritation, would talk of them as affectations. Even admitting them to be indefensible, it seems to me that, if he is chargeable with affectation at all (and I do not think he is), it is rather when he writes the classical English, say, of the Life of Schiller. As anyone who ever heard Carlyle talk knows, the style natural to him was that of The Diamond Necklace.1 These observations have a bearing on the adverse criticisms of a like kind, to which Tyndall was sometimes subjected. Modes of speech and action which some called mannerisms, or even affectations, were, in fact, entirely natural; and showed themselves in full force, sometimes with a very droll effect, in the smallest gathering of intimate friends, or with one or two on a hillside, from whom abundant chaff was the only response likely to come. I say, once more, Tyndall was not merely theoretically, but practically, above all things sincere; the necessity of doing, at all hazards, that which he judged, rightly or wrongly, to be just and proper, was the dominant note of his character; and he was influenced by it in his manner of dealing with questions which might seem, to men of the world, hardly worth taking so seriously. Of the controversies in which he became involved, some of the most troublesome were undertaken on behalf of other people who, as he conceived, had been treated with injustice. The same instinct of veracity ran through all Tyndall's scientific work. That which he knew, he knew thoroughly, had turned over on all sides, and probed through and through. Whatever subject he took up, he never rested till he had attained a clear conception of all the conditions and processes involved, or had satisfied himself that it was not attainable. And in dealing with physical problems, I really think that he, in a manner, saw the atoms and molecules, and felt their pushes and pulls. A profound distrust of all long chains of deductive reasoning (outside mathematics), unless the links could be experimentally or observationally tested at no long intervals, was simply another manifestation of the same fundamental quality. I was not overburdened with love for such dialectic festoon-work myself, but I owe not a little to my friend for helping to abolish as much as remained. 1 In reading the very positive conclusions, based upon differences of style, about the authorship of ancient writings, enunciated by some critics, I have sometimes wondered whether, if the two pieces to which I have alluded had come down to us as anonymous ancient manuscripts, the demonstration that they were written by different persons might not have been quite easy. |