1Reviewing Marius the Epicurean in 1885, Mrs Ward praised Walter Pater for his successful concealment of autobiographical elements in his first novel as befitted British custom: ‘As a nation we are not fond of direct “confessions”. All our autobiographical literature, compared to the French and German, has a touch of dryness and reserve’ (Pater 1980, 131). In the case of the British, Ward explained, citing Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus as an example, ‘what is deepest, most intimate, and most real in its personal experience’ is subjected both to a ‘natural tendency to expression’ and to ‘a natural tendency to disguise’ (Ward 131). Because of that tendency, British autobiography—‘An account of a person’s life given by himself or herself, esp. one published in book form’ (OED)—was appreciated only when it was fictionalised and sufficiently transparent for the reader to discover the writer behind the mask, when it had succeeded in ‘interposing some light screen or some obvious mask between [English feeling] and the public’ (Ward 131). Autobiography was successful when it verged on the roman à clé. The remark was unsurprising from the author of Robert Elsmere, the best-selling novel of 1888 and a controversial roman à clé of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy. Soon, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903) would be a paradigmatic instance of fin de siècle thinly veiled autobiographies proving Mrs Ward’s screen theory true.
- 1 William Wordsworth, ‘My Heart Leaps up’ (l. 7).
2Whether nourished by letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, or reminiscences, the numerous nineteenth-century autobiographies progressively defined a genre the evolution of which was heavily commented upon, notably in high-class magazines (Rinehart 1954). A strange mix of Greek and Saxon (OED), the word appeared in 1797 and gained currency in the 1860s. In an earlier article, Keith Rinehart considers some 171 autobiographical works published in nineteenth-century Britain now considered canonical, noting that 29 were published between 1880 and 1889, and 39 in the following decade, exemplifying an increasing interest in life narratives. Wordsworth’s famous ‘The Child is father of the Man’ refreshed a long-standing tradition of life-writing, providing it with a rationale1 which echoed more or less ironically throughout the century. Individual historicity, still indebted to the ‘hermeneutical autobiography’ harking to the 17th century (Peterson 1986), became a frame for understanding the deployment of one’s life. Readers of the 1860s and 1870s devoured Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman’s spiritual autobiography and John Stuart Mill’s posthumous intellectual Autobiography, which Leslie Stephen used to comment upon the difference between autobiography and biography (Stephen 1881). Retracing the history of the genre in the Victorian era, Ira B. Nadel addresses the dilemmas of the Victorian autobiographer: ‘the selection of his form’ and ‘how to integrate that form with [one’s] natural desire but social resistance to personalizing experience’ (Nadel 1982, 189). When Romantic confessions were no longer accepted for their frankness as the century unfolded, apologies, ‘the defense of the self’, became ‘a necessary antidote to the self-indulgence brought about by the confession’ (190). The apology came to be envisaged as a viable alternative so long as its author did not engage in too personal a disclosure—with its focus on spirituality and theological discussions Apologia Pro Vita Sua perfectly met expectations. Autobiography privileged an apologetic tone, the writer vindicating the validity of his/her position while his/her distance guaranteed it remained socially acceptable. In turn, ‘the preponderance of objective, descriptive’ autobiographies ‘created a conflict over form resolved only through the emergence of the mask as an autobiographical strategy late in the century’ (Nadel 1982 190). The heir of both confession and apology, the Victorian autobiography reinvented itself as the expression of a masked autobiographer. Mrs Ward was attuned to such an evolution when she pointed out ‘some light screen or some obvious mask’ interposed to avoid too intimate a disclosure. Likewise, reviewing Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, the anonymous contributor to the British Medical Journal noticed that it enabled to discover the man behind the mask with ‘a beauty of character revealed’ (C.S.T 1900, 1322). Whether masked, confessional or apologetic, truth remained the goal of autobiographical writings.
- 2 Correspondence, notebooks, diaries and papers, London University, Imperial College Archives, Ref. B (...)
3Pater was not the only essayist, intellectual and periodical contributor to shy away from autobiography’s lure. Thomas H. Huxley persistently refused to publish any autobiographical text until he was compelled to do so, and he finally published a few deceptively short pages in 1890. Such reticence has elicited few comments among critics, arguably because his biographers and critics generally rely on the Life and Letters published by Leonard Huxley in 1900, and further completed by the digitization of the Huxley Papers2 and other correspondences, which have provided a more rounded but also a more complex portrait. As Leslie Stephen noted in the columns of the Nineteenth Century, Life and Letters read as a discreet autobiography fortunately supplementing Huxley’s autobiographical reticence. Contrasting the task of biographers and autobiographers, he remarked: ‘The biographer can never quite equal the autobiographer, but with a sufficient supply of letters he may approximate very closely to the same result. Huxley’s letters are fortunately abundant, and amount to a singularly clear, though quite unconscious, self-revelation.’ (Stephen 1902, 190) What Huxley had reluctantly provided, or failed to, in his lifetime was finally provided posthumously. His personal truth lay in his letters, not in his published writings.
- 3 See ‘Rhetorical Stance: Secular Theologian’ (Jensen 1991, 126‒42).
- 4 ‘He is the mask without the face’, Henry James, ‘To Edmund Gosse [Dec. 13th, 1894.]’ https://www.gu (...)
- 5 ‘autobiographies are essentially works of fiction, whatever biographies may be’ (Huxley 1974, 100).
4Why was Huxley so reluctant to engage in autobiography? Why was a public man who never shied away from controversy, who provoked and greatly enjoyed it, adopting the ‘rhetorical stance’ of the ‘secular theologian’ (Jensen 1991, 125),3 so reticent to personal expression? Or rather, how was he led to overcome his reluctance when he was compelled to write ‘a preemptive document’ as his autobiography (Sturrock 1977, 52)? As Henry James famously quipped, Pater was ‘the mask without the face’,4 but Huxley was all reluctance. Solicited to write about his life in February 1889 by musical critic Louis Engel, he evoked his ‘profound objection’ to self-presentation and explained he could not see ‘what business the public had with [his] private life’ (Huxley 1974, 100). Always on the defensive, he expressed his ‘complete sympathy with Dr Johnson’s desire to take Boswell’s life when he heard of the latter’s occupation with his biography’ (100). Arguably, Huxley voiced the Victorian reticence to autobiography understood as an incursion into one’s ‘private’ life, and asserted his independence and freedom from public inquiry, maintaining a strict division between private and public life. This was the territory Dr Johnson thought Boswell had unforgivably invaded and which he was prepared to defend. For his part, Huxley felt compelled to respond—‘you put before me the alternative of issuing something that may be all wrong, unless I furnish you with something authoritative’ (100). His letter contained the text published in 1890 as ‘Autobiography’ requesting the editor to bear any ensuing blame. As he felt his correspondent was somehow threatening him with publishing erroneous information, Huxley ‘yield[ed]’ and sent a text he deemed accurate, as opposed to ‘egotistical gossip’ or ‘works of fiction’ (100), which he derogatorily equated autobiography with.5 Such remark foregrounds his derogatory vision of fiction but also begs the question of what Huxley understood by ‘fiction’ as he repeatedly uses the word in the 1880s to characterise Biblical narratives. Fiction is first the antonym of truth, and autobiography a debased form of gossip.
- 6 Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Agnosticism’, The Nineteenth Century 25 (March 1889): 169‒94.
5Huxley’s fear was not new: his previous experience of unwilling disclosure determined him to satisfy Engel’s pressing request with an apology tinged with irony. Such fear was closely linked to his public identity as a believer and it was concomitantly reanimated. Although published in 1890, ‘Autobiography’ immediately precedes Huxley’s confession as an agnostic in the columns of the secular Nineteenth Century, his friend James Knowles’s monthly, in March 1889. Just after complying with Engel’s request, Huxley writes ‘Agnosticism’,6 which reads both as his definition of the word and a personal history of belief formation, i.e. as a confession. Embroiled in a budding controversy triggered by the report of the Annual Church Congress published in October 1888, terming agnosticism an ‘evasion’ and calling agnostics ‘infidels’, Huxley was then compelled to publicly state his personal creed. Expressing himself in a distinguished periodical to which he had contributed from the start, his stanCE Is both personal and adversarial.
6Of the two forms the Victorian era privileged, Huxley chose both, and both ‘Agnosticism’ and ‘Autobiography’ should be situated within a continuum, including letters, diaries and notes, ranging from periodical confession to ironic apology in a volume. Illuminated by the circumstances in which it was published (Huxley reacting to abuse and to the threat to publish ‘works of fiction’) his autobiographical writings are closely linked to his belief, and to his identity as an agnostic. Unmentioned in ‘Autobiography’, his public life appears structured around his belief and belief-formation as he eloquently confesses in the three articles published from March to June 1889 in the Nineteenth Century. Consequently, this paper follows his intricate paths to self-presentation between reluctant apology and forced confession, as different but well-adjusted responses to different demands, as well as to potentially erroneous or offensive labels. Attentive to the circumstances and media of the 1889 and 1890 publications, and to their argumentative constraints, it is also attentive to the contents and the rhetorical devices and genres Huxley uses to engage in life-writing. To the fin de siècle aesthetic of the mask, Huxley opposes the twin rhetoric of apology and confession in the construction of his public agnostic persona, vindicating both his belief, its formation, his coinage of the word and his later verbal battles to defend it before all misrepresentations.
7Situated at the intersection of different genres, modes of publication, and infamous appellations, Huxley’s autobiographical writings deploy through several texts, some published and some unpublished, all mastering the forms of confession and apology; they are informed by the history of his agnosticism including his two definitions of it (Dockrill 1971) completed in his later contributions. Written within a relatively short span of time, those usually neglected writings deserve discussion as they rely on apparently individual passionate utterance and impersonal ironic detachment while refusing generic alternatives. In his ‘Autobiography’, Huxley appears to revise and ironically comment upon the very exercise of the genre; in the periodical contributions of 1889, he engages in individual argumentative expression. Whether elicited by the fear of falsehoods or offensive appellations Huxley read as addressed to himself, the preservation of his identity triggered different defence mechanisms discussed in what follows.
8Provocatively equating autobiographies with ‘works of fiction’, i.e. with statements that, like biblical narratives, could not be proved true, Huxley had grounds to distrust biographers as he had repeatedly been subjected to public appellation and print interpellation between 1870 and 1889. Personal expression was closely linked to individual belief, and unless spurred to state it to contradict offensive or erroneous statements, Huxley felt it incumbent to remain silent. As Bernard Lightman notes, he denied the paternity of ‘agnosticism’ for a surprisingly long time (Lightman 2002). From 1870 when R. H. Hutton jokingly called him ‘Pope Huxley’, describing him as ‘great and severe Agnostic’ in the Spectator7 onwards, Huxley rarely entered the public fray to defend his beliefs and explain their origin—to adopt personal expression as a mode of public utterance. Like those of Darwin, both his beliefs and their origins were private. Likewise, he remained silent when Hutton reminisced about his ‘rich and resonant voice’ heard at the Metaphysical Society’s monthly sessions in the columns of the Nineteenth Century in 1885.8
- 9 ‘Prof. Huxley contributes to The Agnostic Annual, just published by Messrs. Cattell and Sons, a bri (...)
- 10 T. H. Huxley ‘To the Editor’, The Academy 24.603 (24 November 1883): 350. Huxley was annoyed at hav (...)
9In an 1883 letter meant to remain private, Huxley confessed the paternity of the term and provided his definition to Charles Albert Watts, the son of the well-known secularist Charles Watts, enquiring about agnosticism. Learning of Watts’s intent to publish his letter in the Agnostic Annual, the small-circulation magazine he edited, Huxley complained of such ‘dishonourable trick’ in a letter to John Tyndall (cit. Lightman 281). On 17 November 1883, the ‘Notes and News’ column of the Academy mentioned his forthcoming contribution and credited him with coining the appellation and defining it.9 In a letter to the editor published in the following issue,10 Huxley complained of Watts’s ethical breach, confessed to having coined the word, and denied having invented a movement the origins of which he traced to Socrates down to Descartes and the 18th-century philosophy of Kant and Hume as he had explained in his Hume (1879). Having redirected the exchange to the printed word, he returned to silence while his fateful letter to Watts was finally published in the January issue of the Agnostic Annual. The ethical consequences of agnosticism proved one of the serious bones of contention between periodical contributors as the word gained increasing currency in the early 1880s. By 1889, it was bound to spark controversy whenever it was used in magazines.
- 11 ‘Autobiography’, From Handel to Halle: Biographical Sketches with Autobiographies of Professor Huxl (...)
10Huxley envisaged autobiography not as a nostalgic investigation of the past, a literary unravelling of different threads, the establishment of narrative order over a tangled life but as an explanation of his current position, ‘at the end of the day’ (Huxley 1974, 108), excluding his beliefs. With its ‘quaint and cumbersome title’ (Sturrock 1977), Biographical Sketches with Autobiographies of Professor Huxley and Professor Herkomer11 is an illustrated collection of portraits of musicians (Handel, Gluck, Beethoven, Arthur Sullivan, and ‘three prodigies’) to which, unexpectedly, Herkomer’s and Huxley’s autobiographies have been added with ‘real editorial cunning’ (Sturrock 1977). Hubert von Herkomer (1849‒1914), a celebrated painter who had been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1885, might stand as the artist as opposed to the ‘scientific giant’ commanding ‘general attention’ that is Huxley, presented as such in the introduction (Engel 1890, vii). Engel, himself a Viennese music critic who emigrated to Britain, prints the narrative that has gone down to us as his autobiography (Engel 1890, vii), and also appends Huxley’s letter about autobiography (Engel 1890, 121).
11Huxley’s ‘Autobiography’ is a formal, albeit a short autobiography, offering ‘a special kind of biographical truth: a life, reshaped by recollection, with all of the recollection’s conscious and unconscious omissions and distortions.’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Reading more like an apology than as an autobiography, a ‘conscious composition reflecting organizational detail, control’ the purpose of which is ‘to justify, defend or explain’ (Nadel 1982, 191), it is clearly indebted to Darwin’s autobiography published in 1887 (Lightman 2002) while playing with the rhetorical and argumentative aspects of the genre. It is also an exercise in rhetoric and rhetorical fencing by a seasoned controversialist.
- 12 ‘point de passage obligé dans toute biographie (date et lieu de naissance, formation reçue etc.)’ h (...)
12Huxley’s diminutive text resolutely steers clear from the established ‘pattern of authority, rebellion and illness’ between father and son structuring many autobiographies (Krenis 1987, 130). It includes the expected ‘biographemes’12 such as birth, education, childhood reminiscences, and notable experiences up to 1852. Pointedly eschewing what Philippe Lejeune terms ‘the irreal of the past’ (what could have happened in other circumstances) (Lejeune 1998), it remains factual, indulging in a ‘narrative strategy of modesty’ (Nadel 1982, 193). Huxley does not really problematise his life, and, like Renan, displays no regret. His narrative is also notable for the series of humoristic, wry, ironic, ambiguously self-deprecatory, comments. No bees giving him ‘mellifluous eloquence’, he only acquires ‘the plainest of plain language’ (101). Unsure of why he was called Thomas, he approves of the first name of an apostle with whom he has ‘always felt most sympathy’ (101). In a much-abbreviated genealogy, he provides a short portrait of his mother whose wit was a ‘peculiarity’ he inherited (101). An older Huxley has ‘next to nothing’ to say about his childhood, except the ‘distinct recollection of certain curls’, of which he was ‘vain’ (102). His ‘regular school training’ is described hyperbolically, almost as a pastiche, as ‘of the briefest’ type; the society of school friends is described as ‘the worst he has ever known’ sinCE Its members were ‘left to the operation of the struggle for existence’ so that his childhood memories amount to ‘a battle’ (102).
13Huxley’s desire to study mechanical engineering is thwarted when he finds himself studying medicine. As he takes an interest in physiology, readers may expect some revelation, but their expectations are subverted when Huxley comments he is ‘afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist’ in him and shows how his ‘extraordinary attraction’ for ‘the study of the intricacies of the living structure nearly proved fatal’ (103) after falling ill as a result of his attending his first post-mortem examination. Like many Victorian autobiographers, he remains quite silent on an episode many biographers would label depressive. But he notes the return of mental and physical health ‘com[ing] back on the wings of the breeze’, concluding that ‘to this day, the faint odour of wood-smoke . . . is as good’ (104) to him. That foundational souvenir asserts his ensuing health and soundness of mind.
14Should readers expect to learn much about his ‘Lehrjahre’ (an obvious echo of the Bildungsroman), they are disappointed as it does not function as ‘edification’ (104). His first role model, Wharton Jones, is briefly mentioned as he convinces Huxley to publish his first scientific paper in 1845. Sir John Richardson to whom Huxley is sent to look for employment ‘took not the slightest notice of [his] worshipful self’ (105). His seminal voyage on the Rattlesnake is hyperbolically described both as an ‘exceptionally rough’ life on board and an ‘extremely valuable’ journey (106). Thanks to an adroit litotes, Huxley concludes he is ‘inclined to think that [his] naval life was not the least valuable part of [his] education’ (106). Back on land, his trials continue as he engages in a ‘battle’ with the Admiralty. He inaugurates the next phase of his professional life by quoting Balzac’s Rastignac: ‘à nous deux’ (107), an ironic self-aggrandizement as he vainly desires to obtain a professorship in Physiology or comparative anatomy (108). Still convinced that ‘London was the place’ for him (108), he is offered a position he does not enjoy, but keeps. His reminiscences abruptly stop in 1852 with his ‘oratorical experiments’, ‘on a Friday evening, at the Royal Institution’ and he finally confesses ‘to having been guilty, malgré moi, of as much public speaking as most of my contemporaries’, which has finally ‘ceased to be so much of a bugbear’ to him (108).
- 13 ‘self-life narrators (like the rest of us), in accounting for key identity-forming decisions and ac (...)
15With its ironic hyperboles, its evaluative axiological adjectives, his understatements and litotes, his text is an exercise in argumentation, fully mastered and meant both to convince and to comment upon the very genre of the apology. Huxley adopts the ethos of the cautious, unconvinced and reluctant man of science, not so much about himself, but about ‘the work of his life’ as it implies a personal judgement that he feels is biased: ‘The last thing that it would be proper’ for him to do would be ‘to say at the end of the day, whether I think I have earned my wages or not.’ (108) Yet, he asserts his impartiality: ‘Men are said to be partial judges of themselves—young men may be, I doubt if old men are’. (108) Vindicating his autobiography ethics,13 he allows himself to evoke ‘the objects [he has] had more or less definitely in view’ since [he began ‘the ascent of [his] hillock]’: the promotion of ‘the increase of natural knowledge’, ‘the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life to the best of [his] ability’ as he is increasingly convinced ‘that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action’ (109). Such display of the Victorian ethic of work and action is to be expected from the man of science who insists on a clear, unprejudiced apprehension of the world as it is: ‘when the garment of make-believe, by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features, is stripped off’ (109).
16More precisely, Huxley considers his whole life as devoted to ‘untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit’ presented as ‘the deadly enemy of science’ (109). Positing himself as an opponent to the clergy, he can finally present himself as the recipient of gratifying awards and prestigious positions, such as ‘the Presidency of the Royal Society’ (109). But those are lesser ‘marks of success’ (109) as compared to his more important contribution: having ‘somewhat helped that movement of opinion which has been called the New Reformation’ (108), having been instrumental in a redistribution of the different bodies of knowledge across society.
17Leslie Stephen’s later praise testifies to Huxley’s success as an autobiographer: his ‘resolution to be strictly logical and to be clear before anything only forces him to exert his powers of vivifying the subject by happy illustration or humorous side-lights, or sometimes by outbursts of hearty pugnacity, and now and then by the eloquent passages, the more effective because under strict control, which reveal his profound sense of the vast importance of the questions at issue.’ (Stephen 1902, 196). Whether read as a naïve assessment of Huxley’s career or as a more ambiguous comment on the art of self-presentation, Stephen underlines Huxley’s mastery of the apology.
18As Gavin de Beer, the most recent editor of his ‘Autobiography’ notes, Huxley’s brief narrative adheres to the period’s divide between private and public life as it ‘omits many personal matters’ such as marriage or family (Huxley 1974, xii). Continuously engaging in preterition, self-inflicted irony, ambiguous self-deprecation, euphemism, and more importantly ellipsis, Huxley presents himself as the passive recipient of ‘the devoted kindness of many friends’ (109), effacing his tremendous activities and more importantly his agency and narrative persona. His sketch displays his mastery of the apology as ‘the vehicle for endorsing the public career of the author, functioning as a summation of his life and as a key to understanding its success’ (Nadel 1982, 194) while ensuring his avoidance of ‘the troubling engagement with his feelings’, in an echo of ‘the ‘persona Darwin creates in his Autobiography’ (Nadel 1982, 193).
19Predictably, the text was reprinted in his Collected Essays in 1892, rubbing shoulders with longer, more prestigious essays, accompanied by introductory remarks on the art and ethics of autobiography. Quoting Butler reflecting on the duty of autobiography, Huxley concedes that ‘the good bishop lived in an age when a man might write books and yet be permitted to keep his private existence to himself; in the pre-Boswellian epoch, when the germ of the photographer lay in the womb of the distant future, and the interviewer who pervades our age was an unforeseen, indeed unimaginable, birth of time’ (CE I, 1‒2). Attentive to the late nineteenth-century journalistic context with its focus on the individual, Huxley situates the ethical stakes of the public speech of the man of science: how can one keep one’s integrity? Supposing an ‘importunate person’ has a ‘portrait’ ‘about to be published and . . . accompanied by a biography which the importunate person proposes to write’ (CE I, 2). How can the individual respond with integrity? Huxley refuses the option of ‘revis[ing] the “biography”’, or ‘allow[ing] the publication of a mass of more or less fulsome inaccuracies for which he will be held responsible’, arguing it is best to ‘do the thing himself.’ (CE I, 2) The autobiographical text becomes the outcome of a rational decision, of ethical reflection. Whether sincere or ironic, Huxley’s mortification of the self to satisfy the requirements of the genre was replaced with the confessional outburst of the 1889 trilogy where the real turning point of 1869 was finally presented and explained, once again, in a carefully structured and argumentative frame which he enjoyed subverting.
- 14 ‘the adoption of the term Agnostic is only an attempt to shift the issue, and . . . it involves a m (...)
- 15 ‘Agnosticism’, The Nineteenth Century 25 (March 1889): 169‒94; Essays on Some Controverted Question (...)
- 16 The contributions of Huxley, Wace, Magee, Mallock, Harrison and Ward were first reprinted in 1889 a (...)
20As he was ‘led to write and permit the publication of the subjoined sketch’ (CE I, 2), Huxley was provided with a reason for publicly stating who he was and what he believed in. An infamous appellation was the agent provocateur for a public confession. During the Annual Church Congress held in Manchester in September 1888, Rev. Henry Wace, principal of King’s College, London, attacked agnosticism as a cowardly cloak for any ‘infidel’ (Wace 1895, 6) and equated the agnostic with the ‘unbeliever’.14 Such cowardice, a sermonizing Wace explained, ought to be exposed even if it ‘carrie[d] an unpleasant significance’ and he insisted that: ‘It is, and it ought to be, an unpleasant thing for a man to have to say plainly that he does not believe Jesus Christ’ (6). Infidel and unbeliever, Huxley was not. On reading the report, he asked Knowles, owner and editor of the Nineteenth Century, whether he was ‘minded to admit a goring article in the February XIX’ (LL 2, 235, italics mine). Upon Knowles’s agreement, he published ‘Agnosticism’,15 while commenting to his daughter Ethel that ‘the bishops and clergy won’t let me alone, so I have been able to keep me pretty well amused in replying’ (LL 2, 235). That article is famous as the issue of the Nineteenth Century went into four editions and was extensively discussed in the British and American periodicals, possibly because Huxley provided a confessional response to accusations of infidelity. His contribution was the prelude to Knowles’s ‘stage-managed confrontation’ (Lightman 2002, 288) between Huxley, Wace, and Dr W. C. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, who, Huxley reminded readers ‘departed so far from his customary courtesy and self-respect as to speak of “cowardly agnosticism” [in 1888] (p. 262).’ (Huxley 1889, 15) Other protagonists such as the positivist Frederick Harrison, the conservative W. H. Mallock and the newly controversial novelist Mary Ward had previously entered the discussion or would do so through 1889.16 As Paul White notes, ‘the 1880s proved an adequate timing of the controversies and the medium in which they unfolded were in some ways felicitous’ (White 2003, 139), firstly because it had already published essays on agnosticism (Lightman 2002, 282‒3), secondly because it enabled a structured discussion following the model of contribution, response and rejoinder itself indebted to Knowles’s editorial model of the ‘Symposium’ of 1877 and 1878. In the monthly, Huxley had for a while assumed the ‘role of the social critic, freeing the English people from the oppressive forces of priestcraft, and protecting the language of scientific explanation and natural law from abuse’ (White 2003, 139). Arguably, the 1889 controversy over agnosticism coming just as he had satisfied Engel’s request freed Huxley to public self-expression. Reading ‘as a unique and logical fusion of Huxley’s personal and professional experience’, his 1889 trilogy ‘stressed the biographical logic which led to his antignostic position’ (Paradis 1978 102, 103).
- 17 ‘So much of Dr. Wace’s address either explicitly or implicitly concerns me, that I take upon myself (...)
- 18 ‘it is asserted that I have no business to call myself an agnostic; that if I am not a Christian I (...)
- 19 The episode is found in the synoptic gospels: Matthew, 8, 28-34; Mark 5, 1; Luke 8, 26.
- 20 ‘I reiterate my total disbelief in the whole Gadarene story’ (228).
21It is firstly to the offensive appellation of ‘unbeliever’ printed in the Report that Huxley responded, as he felt addressed to ‘either explicitly or implicitly’17 (CE V, 257). He began his contribution both by insisting that he spoke ‘for [him]self alone’ so as to clear the ground for his ensuing explanation while refuting the existence of ‘any sect of Agnostics’ of which he would be the ‘acknowledged prophet or pope’ (257). He further claimed his right to describe himself as an agnostic and contested the appellation of ‘infidel’.18 Agnostic he was—‘I say of agnosticism in this matter, “J’y suis, et j’y reste”’ (230)—but adroitly returning the accusation, he tartly asked: ‘Now what is a Christian?’ (230). Wace’s labels begged the question of what, exactly, a Christian was, and what he exactly believed in: ‘To what doctrine do you ask me to be faithful?’ (233) Carefully and argumentatively framed, such a question was treated by Huxley’s reading of the biblical narrative of the ‘Gadarene pig-owners’,19 which, he argued, lay ‘strictly within the province of natural science’ (214), and which he finally discarded as unbelievable.20 As one contending that ‘the existence of demons who can be transferred from a man to a pig does thus contravene probability’ (228), Huxley was assuredly not a Wacean Christian.
22Huxley further contested ‘Dr. Wace’s account of the origin of the name of “Agnostic”’ (235). The coinage of the noun was already well known, Huxley acknowledged, as he expressed his reluctance ‘to go over an old story once more’ explaining that changing circumstances and objectives led him to ‘telling it a little more fully than it has yet been told’ (235). That old story was also Huxley’s personal history: ‘The reader who has had the patience to follow the enforced, but unwilling, egotism of this veritable history . . . will now see why my mind steadily, gravitated toward the conclusions of Hume and Kant’ (237). What Hume had kept silent was revealed: at this point, Huxley engages in a confession partly modelled on the Bildungsroman, partly modelled on the conversion narrative. Reminiscing about his childhood when he found himself free to read different studies, he points how William Hamilton’s ‘On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned’ ‘stamped upon [his] mind the strong conviction . . . that the limitation of our faculties, in a great number of cases, renders real answers to [the most solemn and important of questions] not merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable’ (236).
23This unacknowledged agnosticism (understood as the impossibility of assenting to a given proposition) persisted when he had to define himself as a believer. Was he ‘an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker [?]’ (237) At that stage Huxley concludes that he ‘had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last’ (238). Close to freethinking, Huxley sensed that any appellation was unsuited to his belief as he was unable or unsure of having acquired some knowledge, as he was even convinced of being incapable of achieving knowledge or coming to a solution to the ‘problem of existence’ (238). Ironically contrasting ‘good people’ who were ‘quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis”’, and his near certainty that ‘the problem [of existence] was insoluble’ (238), Huxley found himself in a quandary described through the famous Dantean metaphor of being lost in a dark forest: ‘una selva oscura’ (238).
24Surprisingly, the solution appeared when he joined the Metaphysical Society described as a ‘remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory’ (238). The Society had been launched by Knowles in 1869 to make believers of different creeds engage in discussions during monthly sessions. By 1880, any rapprochement had proved impossible, but at the beginning, the Society welcomed members regardless of their creed and ‘most of [his] colleagues were -ists of one sort or another’ (238). Huxley’s initial problem was that he had none of an ‘-ist’ to define himself and stood like a naked animal before his peers: ‘the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with’ (238). The rest soon became history: ‘So I . . . invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant’ (239). As a label, agnosticism appears first as a response to Huxley’s lack of clear-cut identity before his well-identified peers; once he labels himself, Huxley can join the bandwagon ‘parading’ his label at the Society, ‘to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes.’ (239) The label significantly functions as an addendum, a rounding up of identity, as an equalizer situating Huxley as an ordinary member of the pluriconfessional Society before it is made public in the Spectator where it ‘took’ while ‘any suspicion in the minds of respectable people, that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely lulled’ (239). The unquiet author of the coinage has already disappeared behind the printed word of Hutton, and finds himself in the ‘“verace via”—the straight road’, which ‘led nowhere else but into the dark depths of a wild and tangled forest’ (239). Agnosticism functions both as a terminus a quo and as a terminus ad quem of identity formation.
25Having provided readers with the ‘history of the origin of the terms “agnostic” and “agnosticism”’, Huxley can conclude on his disagreement with ‘the confident assertion’ of Wace ‘that “the adoption of the term agnostic is only an attempt to shift the issue, and that it involves a mere evasion” in relation to the Church and Christianity’ (240). His confession enables him to respond to the accusation of ‘cowardly agnosticism’ by grafting agnosticism to a philosophical secular tradition. Therefore, honestly publicizing one’s secular belief before the reverend Principal of King’s College ‘ought not to be unpleasant’, on the contrary: the idea that it ‘ought to be “unpleasant” for any man to say anything which he sincerely, and after due deliberation, believes, is, to my mind, a proposition of the most profoundly immoral character’ (240). By quoting his opponent’s offensive words, Huxley reformulates them to situate immorality on the side of the orthodox believers. Refraining oneself from expressing one’s belief becomes ‘quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that most valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed’ (241), Huxley concludes in an echo of the life ethics of his ‘Autobiography’.
26Repeating and reversing Wace’s strictures, Huxley insists: ‘A thousand times, no! It ought not to be unpleasant to say that which one honestly believes or disbelieves’ (241). Moreover, honest expression ought to be respected, and Huxley gives the first definition of agnosticism as epistemic accountability: ‘not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. . . . the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him’ (246). Such accountability has two limits: the ‘fundamental axiom of modern science’ demands that ‘In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration’; ‘do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable’ (246). Enquiry as limited and framed by demonstrability is Huxley’s ‘agnostic faith’, he needs to ‘keep whole and undefiled’ (246).
- 21 Huxley was conscious of the public exchange: in a letter to Knowles, he noted the public dimension (...)
27If Huxley generalizes his stance by addressing throughout the impersonal ‘you’ of readers,21 he also concludes by stating anew that he expresses his personal stance: ‘I speak only for myself’ (247). Such a reminder shows the importance of expressing his belief before others to avoid hasty generalizations and appellations, in fact, to situate himself in a multifaceted community of agnostics with their own definitions of the word. It is also within that confusing cartography including critical exegetes of the Bible labelling themselves as such (Lightman 2002, 285) that Huxley needs to situate his own position.
28In formulating the ‘agnostic faith’ and speaking ‘only for [him]self’, Huxley engages in a confession verging on apology, hybridizing both genres. Identity becomes a self-invention ratified and publicised thanks to print, with the capacity of obscuring its origin. Therefore, any autobiography or confession can only reach the point when the private becomes public according to the individual’s invention, according to the name he gives to his newfound identity. Confessing the origin of his agnosticism, Huxley also confesses his incapacity of a more intimate or private autobiography. Once the private belief is acknowledged by others, printed and made public, regardless of its link to the individual, autobiography becomes impossible and resolves itself in the narrative of the acquisition of a ‘rag’, i.e. in the history of an appellation. As a continuation and completion of ‘Autobiography’, the 1889 confession culminates on a dramatic avowal leading to silence as the ultimate response to the foundational question of the believing I.
- 22 T. H. Huxley, ‘Agnosticism: A Rejoinder’, The Nineteenth Century 25 (1889): 481‒504.
- 23 ‘I desire to be held fully responsible for everything I say’ (267).
29In their respective answer, Wace and Peterborough maintained Huxley did not meet their criticisms, and he accordingly responded with ‘Agnosticism: A Rejoinder’,22 continuing to speak in his own name23 to vindicate his respectability and truth before ‘the public as regards the sins of commission and omission’ with which he had been ‘charged’ (265). Still refusing Wace’s narrow alternative, he embarked on a stimulating history of early Christianity when Christians’ beliefs were as diverse as the appellations he provided them with (290), therefore demonstrating the persistence and historical relativity of the notion of infidelity. Wace, he concluded, believed in ‘a monstrous and mischievous fiction’ to which he ‘unhesitatingly expresses [his] disbelief in any assertion that it is true, by whomsoever made’ (307‒8). Wace’s belief in ‘the Gadarene story’ (307) led him to an alternative that Huxley refused, insisting that he was not a member of the ‘people [Wace] calls “infidels”’, as it implied ‘the profession of belief in such stories as the Gadarene pig affair, on the strength of a tradition of unknown origin, of which two discrepant reports, also of unknown origin, alone remain’ (308). Agnosticism also consisting in demonstrability, it was impossible to pretend that ‘the Gadarene pig affair’ was anything else than a fiction no agnostic could take seriously. Huxley’s exegesis of the ‘Gadarene story’ exemplifies his use of the agnostic method, enabling him to assert his legitimacy, not as a man of science but, as scholars have noted (Turner 1974, Lightman 1987), as a biblical exegete and historian, equipped with principles and methods, steeped in disciplinary autonomy, as against the authority of the Church.
- 24 ‘in my poor judgment’ (304).
30While engaging in apparent self-deprecation,24 Huxley ironically concludes directly addressing his opponents to warn them that their ‘line’ is bound to fail: ‘it will not be long before all men of common sense qualify for a place among the “infidels”’ (307). Who can qualify as a Christian if it entails belief in the Gadarene story when Huxley’s exegesis has demonstrated the narrative to be as fictional as some autobiographies?
- 25 ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’, The Nineteenth Century 25 (1889): 937‒64. Certainly because he had (...)
- 26 Huxley to Hooker, May 30, 1889 [HP 2.344]
- 27 Originally published in Contemporary Review, 1877; reprinted William K. Clifford, Lectures and Essa (...)
- 28 The text is now a classical philosophical text, extensively commented.
31His ironic response did not satisfy his opponents. He was still accused of relying on ‘“evasion”’, his ‘chief resource,’ of ‘“incapacity for strict argument” and “rottenness of ratiocination”’ as his ‘main mental characteristics’ (347), so that the demonstrability of his knowledge was inexistent. Requesting Knowles to have the last word, Huxley closed the discussion in ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’.25 In private, he wrote his long-time friend Joseph Dalton Hooker that he had enjoyed what he called a ‘wind-up with Wace’ wishing his reader would derive as much pleasure from its reading as he had ‘in the writing’ of a response he described as ‘full of malice as an egg is full of meat’.26 His final response discussed past miracles, wondering when they had officially ceased to be recognized as such. Still ‘speaking for [him]self, and without impugning the right of any other person to use the term in another sense’ (310), Huxley now asserted his rights over his coinage and gave the second definition of agnosticism: ‘absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual’ and which ‘may be stated in various ways . . . : that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty’ (310). This time, agnosticism is clearly indebted to William Kingdon Clifford’s ‘ethics of belief’ (1876‒77), first a Metaphysical Society paper (Clifford 2015, 393‒402) which advocated that belief ought to be supported by evidence: ‘It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe’.27 Clifford was a friend of Huxley and his controversial text was heavily commented upon in the periodicals.28
32In a fragment titled ‘Agnosticism’, possibly written in parallel or shortly after his contributions to the Nineteenth Century, Huxley also considers agnosticism not as a ‘creed’ but as ‘the method [into] the cause of belief, which [sic] marks the true agnostic, not the results of the intellectual operation conducted according to that method’. Agnosticism can be profitably applied to ‘the study of natural and civil history’ with ‘certain positive propositions of great importance, which may be regarded as so well founded that no serious objections can be brought against them.’29 The demonstration that serious objections could be brought against the ‘Gadarene pig-affair’ was precisely what Huxley had achieved in his trilogy.
33Differentiating agnosticism from any faith, Huxley insists: ‘though agnosticism is not, and can not be, a creed, except in so far as its general principle is concerned yet that the application of that principle results in the denial of, or the suspension of judgment concerning, a number of propositions respecting which our contemporary ecclesiastical “gnostics” profess entire certainty’ (311). Following that principle, agnostics suspend their judgment whereas those who do not believe ‘fictions’. Having established his principle and seen the resulting division enables Huxley to suggest the existence of a community of like-minded individuals: ‘I and many other agnostics’, opposed to the ‘clerics and their lay allies’ (314). Now situated within a clearly-defined agnostic community endowed with intellectual autonomy, he can but repeat his ‘deliberate opinion’ and ‘reiterate it’ (363). Closely linked to a stimulating exegesis of a biblical episode woven with a confession, the trilogy is ‘a justification for his personal and professional life’ when Huxley strikes ‘the characteristic dramatic pose of the self amid forces of opposition’ as Paradis notes before adding: ‘we should also note the emotional overtones of the rhetoric’ (Paradis 1978, 102).
- 30 Spencer was too tired to respond in a proper manner (Lightman 2002, 288).
34Huxley’s public confession may have assuaged further confessional impulse: when James Skilton from the Brooklyn Ethical Association wrote to both Huxley and Spencer later in 1889 to ask whether they would like to contribute to a new, more supportive appellation for agnosticism30 Huxley responded that he refused any other appellation and asked for his letter to be published. Liberated by his public confession, he may have felt more confident in expressing his beliefs publicly. Possibly, as Lightman argues (Lightman 2002, 288), Huxley had been reluctant to quarrel with his friend Spencer over the meaning of agnosticism and to come out as an agnostic, but undeniably, he felt no longer bound to remain silent about himself.
35His discussions of biblical narratives in the Nineteenth Century testify to the profitable use of the agnostic method. Huxley’s fragment shows his attempts to define more precisely a term that encompassed and summarised his most intimate identity conspicuously absent from his official ‘Autobiography’. Just as he had subverted the genre as it was meant to appear in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, he subverted the expectations of a periodical contribution in terms of self-expression and ethos, vindicating agnosticism ‘less as an intellectual or philosophical position than as a culmination of his own spiritual and scientific progress’ (Paradis 1978, 102), i.e., as his identity.
36Apparently orthodox but quite subversive, Huxley did not succumb to the autobiographical impulse of many of his contemporaries. Belonging to a group of Victorians adhering to the distinction between the private and the public, the public expression of his belief was problematic. Delayed for a long period, unmentioned in his brief ‘Autobiography’, it appeared in a series of articles discussing a more general issue—the secularization of modern ethics—carefully interlaced with a provocative exegesis of biblical narratives. Finally conceding that biography was best written when it was the product of the concerned individual, Huxley achieved mastery of both the prevalent autobiographical models of the earlier century, the apology and the confession, never relinquishing his uneasiness with the genre in the journalistic context. As framed by apology, autobiography ignores the moment of belief formation and sketches what comes before a seminal moment of initiation to public life, confining the private to inexpression. Autobiography precedes and culminates in public life and, conversely, public life quarantines private life to a time devoid of written expression. As framed by confession, life revolves around belief formation but again, stumbles on the public expression where ‘agnosticism’ ceases to need any explanation, being provided with the ‘tail’ that completes the public intellectual that Huxley wills to be. On a spectrum from absolute confession to absolute silence, Huxley comes close to the second option.
37According to Bernard Lightman, in delaying the avowal of his paternity of ‘agnosticism’ as late as 1889, ‘Huxley had gambled on a risky strategy’ and had ‘lost’ (Lightman 2002, 289). However, his 1889 autobiographical writings tell a different story: as the expression of his personal belief, agnosticism was the result of a trajectory ending in public expression to which there was nothing more to be added.