AFTER his recovery from the attack of erysipelas at Glenlair in 1865, Maxwell's health appears to have been fairly good until the spring of 1877. He then began to be troubled with dyspeptic symptoms, especially with a painful choking sensation after taking meat. He consulted no one for about two years. But one day in 1877, on coming into the Laboratory after his luncheon, he dissolved a crystal of carbonate of soda in a small beaker of water, and drank it off. A little while after this he said he had found how to manage so as to avoid pain. The trouble proved obstinate, however, and at last, on the 21st of April 1879, he mentioned it when writing to Dr. Paget about Mrs. Maxwell.
By this time his friends at Cambridge had begun to observe a change in his appearance, and some failure of the old superabundant energy. They missed the elasticity of step, and the well-known sparkle in his eye. During the Easter Term of 1879 he attended the Laboratory daily, but only stayed a very short time. At the end of the term he remarked that he had been unable to do much more than to give his lectures. And before leaving Cambridge for the vacation, he was more than once very seriously unwell.
In June he returned, as usual, to Glenlair. His letters continued to be marked by humorous cheerfulness, and, as was always the case, contained information about everything and everybody except himself. He was still unwearied in his exertions for those to whom his services could be of use. But some casual remarks gave cause for apprehension that he was not gaining strength, and after he had been in Scotland for a few weeks he wrote that “he felt like a child, as for some time he had been allowed no food but milk.” By and by the reports were more encouraging, and in September, according to appointment, Mr. and Mrs. Garnett were received at Glenlair. On Maxwell’s coming out of the house to welcome them, Mr. Garnett saw a great change in him, and was for the first time seriously alarmed.
In the evening, however, the master of the house conducted family worship as usual for the assembled household. And the days passed much in the same kindly fashion as of old, linking the present to the past in “natural piety.” There were the drawings of the oval curves of 1846; the family scrap-book, with Mrs. Blackburn’s water-colour sketches from the earliest time; the Glenlair autograph book (see above, p. 16); the bagpipes which saved the life of Captain Clerk in the Hooghly; and a host of other treasures which Maxwell took delight in showing. He led his guests down to the river, and accompanied them a little way along its wooded banks, pointing out where the stepping-stones used to be, where he bathed when a boy, and where the exploit of tub-navigation had been performed. This was the longest walk he had taken for some time. He was unable to drive with them in the afternoon, because he could not bear the shaking of the carriage.
On the 2d of October 1879, in the midst of great weakness and of great pain, he was told by the late Dr. Sanders of Edinburgh, who had been summoned to Glenlair, that he had not a month to live. From that moment he had only one anxiety, the same which had for so long been his chief care—to provide for her comfort, whom he now saw that he must leave behind.
He returned to Cambridge; but he was so weak as to be hardly able to walk from the train to a carriage. Under the diligent care of Dr. Paget his most painful symptoms were considerably relieved, and his friends began to entertain fond hopes of his recovery. But his strength gradually failed, and at length it was evident to all that the disease could not be stayed.
During the last few weeks his sufferings were very great, but he seldom mentioned them; and, apart from his anxiety for others, his mind was absolutely calm. The one thought which weighed upon him, and to which he constantly referred, was for the future welfare and comfort of Mrs. Maxwell. During the whole period of their married life (twenty-one years) his ever-present watchfulness and sympathy had supported her even in the smallest domestic concerns; his knowledge, his constructiveness, his dexterity of hand, had been ever ready to minister to her slightest need,—and now, unable to nurse him as of old, she seemed more than ever dependent on his care. To the last, he regularly gave the orders that were necessary for her comfort, and endeavoured to see that they were carried out.
When too weak to dwell on those scientific inquiries which had been the work of his life, his mind continued active about many of his favourite studies. He remarked one day that he had been wondering why the lines in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, about the harmony that is in mortal souls (repeating the whole passage) should have been put in the mouth of such a frivolous person as Lorenzo. At another time, when continuous conversation had become impossible, and he had been lying for some time with closed eyes, he looked up and repeated the verse, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,” etc., and then added—“Do you know that that is a hexameter? πα̂σα δόσις άγαθὴ καὶ πα̂ν δώρημα τέλειον. I wonder who composedit?” He frequently quoted Richard Baxter’s hymn—
On the Saturday preceding his death he received the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper from Dr. Guillemard, and it was while Dr. G. was putting on his surplice that Maxwell repeated to him George Herbert’s lines on the priest’s vestments, entitled Aaron.[235] Maxwell’s mind and memory remained perfectly clear to the very last.
The fortitude with which he bore his sufferings, and the calm self-possession with which he met his end, impressed those most who watched him most narrowly, and had the best reason to know the acuteness of his sufferings.
The end may best be told by those who were nearest to him at the time. I have been favoured with the following communications:—(1) From Dr. Paget; (2) from the Rev. Dr. Guillemard; and (3) from his cousin, Mr. Colin Mackenzie, who acted the part of a brother at the last, as he had done many a time before.
(1.) Dr. Paget's Statement.
In April 1879 he began to be troubled with some difficulty in swallowing—the first significant symptom of the disease which was to prove fatal. The summer he spent at Glenlair. At the end of July he consulted Prof. Sanders and Prof. Spence of Edinburgh, and while at Glenlair was attended by Dr. Lorraine of Castle-Douglas. But he grew worse, and at the end of September Prof. Sanders was summoned to him from Edinburgh. He was then suffering from attacks of violent pain, had become dropsical, and his strength was rapidly fading. At Glenlair he was seven miles from Dr. Lorraine. It was therefore decided to remove him to Edinburgh or Cambridge. He chose Cambridge, and arrived there on October 8, accompanied by Mrs. Maxwell, and attended during the journey by Dr. Richard Lorraine.
In Cambridge his more severe sufferings were gradually in great measure relieved, but the disease continued its progress. It was the disease of which his mother had died at the same age.
As he had been in health, so was he in sickness and in face of death. The calmness of his mind was never once disturbed. His sufferings were acute for some days after his return to Cambridge, and, even after their mitigation, were still of a kind to try severely any ordinary patience and fortitude. But they were never spoken of by him in a complaining tone. In the midst of them his thoughts and consideration were rather for others than for himself.
Neither did the approach of death disturb his habitual composure. Before leaving Glenlair he had learnt from Prof. Sanders that he had not more than about a month to live. A few days before his death he asked me (Dr. Paget) how much longer he could last. The inquiry was made with the most perfect calmness. He wished to live until the expected arrival from Edinburgh of his friend and relative Mr. Colin Mackenzie. His only anxiety seemed to be about his wife, whose health had for a few years been delicate, and had recently become worse. He had been to her for some time the most tender and assiduous of nurses. An hour only before his death, when, through extreme bodily weakness, his voice was reduced to a whisper so feeble that it could be heard only when the ear was held close to his mouth, the words whispered to Dr. Paget related not to himself but to Mrs. Maxwell.
His intellect also remained clear and apparently unimpaired to the last. While his bodily strength was ebbing away to death, his mind never once wandered or wavered, but remained clear to the very end. No man ever met death more consciously or more calmly.[236]
On November 5 he gently passed away.
Dr. Paget’s report of Maxwell’s composure throughout his illness is very strikingly confirmed by his letter to that physician, dated October 3, which is too confidential to be inserted here, but consists of a simple unadorned description of the facts of the case, and a request for aid which he knew would be forthcoming. A stranger, in reading that letter, would never divine, and indeed might find it hard to believe, that on the previous day (Oct. 2) the writer had been told by medical authority that he had only a month to live. Yet such is the fact. The words “for I am really very helpless,” however touching as a description of his condition, are merely the statement of a reason why some one should be got “officially to help” Maxwell himself, but really and chiefly to do for Mrs. Maxwell what he had done so long as he had any strength in him. Students of history may perhaps recall Nicias’s letter to the Athenians:—“You should also send a general to succeed me, for I have a disease, and cannot remain;”[237] but the words of the unfortunate general, “I claim your indulgence,”[238] though dignified enough, are more than Maxwell would have written.
(2.) The following letter, addressed to me by the Rev. Dr. Guillemard, of the Little Trinity Church, Cambridge, may be left to speak for itself:—
Cambridge, 19th May 1881.
My dear Sir—I shall disappoint you very much in my reminiscences of Maxwell. I never was an intimate friend of his, though we were always on the very best terms, and met not unfrequently, and he was most constant and assiduous in his attendance at church, and interested in all church matters.
But I knew very little about his inner self before I was summoned to his dying bed; and he had been brought very low physically, before his return to Cambridge, and was unequal to much continuous thought or conversation. He welcomed me warmly whenever I visited him, joined fervently in all acts of prayer, listened with a most intelligent interest to all I read, either out of the Bible (which he knew well-nigh by heart) or out of any of our great devotional writers in prose or poetry; was especially fond of any new hymns, and frequently capped such by reciting from his wonderful memory some parallel passages of his favourite old authors, specially George Herbert.
His faith in the grand cardinal verities was firm, simple, and full; and he avowed it humbly but unhesitatingly, with the deepest gratitude for the revelation of the truth in Jesus. I do not think he had any doubts or difficulties to cloud his clear mind or shake his peace.
He was calmly and serenely resigned to the will of God, and bowed in meek acquiescence before what he believed to be the Word of God.
I never saw a sign of impatience or fretfulness under all his long suffering, or heard an approach to a murmur. His one and only care was for his wife. It was a grand sight to see him day by day girding himself calmly and resolutely for the last struggle, and he passed through it undismayed. I wish I had preserved any of his last words: they have passed away from my shallow memory.—Yours very truly,
W. H. Guillemard.
I am also permitted to insert the following more circumstantial account, which was written by Dr. Guillemard to the Rev. Isaac Bowman, Vicar of South Creake, Fakenham, Norfolk, on the 9th of December 1879, within five weeks after Maxwell's death:—
He suffered exquisite pain, hardly able to lie still for a minute together, sleepless, and with no appetite for the food which he so required.
He understood his position from the first; knew what it all meant, and calmly girded himself for the awful struggle. He welcomed me at once as visiting him, not only as a friend, but as the Parish Priest come to assist him and to minister to him, and spoke of our relations with a grave, simple cheerfulness. You know the lightheartedness of the man in ordinary times; and really it abode on him throughout; he was never downcast or overburdened, and yet he was the humblest and most diffident of men, with the deepest sense of his own unworthiness, of his many short-comings, of his neglected opportunities. “But he loved much, and love had cast out fear.” I used to go to him nearly every day of the five or six weeks he was here, to read and pray with him. He preferred the prayers of the Church, and asked for them, and by the wonderful power of his memory knew them all by heart; but he gladly joined in other devotions, and took special delight in sacred poetry, of which I generally read him two or three short pieces.
He knew all our best writers in that line thoroughly: Milton, Keble, Newman, Wesley, George Herbert—the latter his chief favourite; and he repeated to me the morning after an unusually bad night, the five stanzas of “Aaron” without a mistake. His knowledge of the Bible was remarkable, and he constantly asked for his most deeply-prized passages. Four days before he was removed from us he received the Holy Communion at my hands, with holy, reverent, fervid devotion, and said what strength it gave him.
I saw him only once again; he was too weak and restless and exhausted for much intercourse; but as I rose from my knees he said:—“My dear friend, you have been a true under shepherd to me: read me, before you go, the beautiful prayer out of the Burial Service, 'Suffer me not at my last hour’”—and his grasp of my hand, as we parted, told me all he felt.
I had known but little of his inner self before his illness; he was singularly reticent; and though we occasionally discussed a text critically, we rarely got upon doctrine, or anything that touched upon the spiritual life. He was a constant regular attendant at church, and seldom, if ever, failed to join in our monthly late celebration of Holy Communion, and he was a generous contributor to all our parish charitable institutions. But his illness drew out the whole heart and soul and spirit of the man: his firm and undoubting faith in the Incarnation and all its results; in the full sufficing of the Atonement; in the work of the Holy Spirit. He had gauged and fathomed all the schemes and systems of philosophy, and had found them utterly empty and unsatisfying—“unworkable” was his own word about them— and he turned with simple faith to the Gospel of the Saviour.
(3.) Mr. Colin Mackenzie, who is by this time well known to the reader, was present at the last. He says:—
A few minutes before his death, Professor Clerk Maxwell was being held up in bed, struggling for breath, when he said slowly and distinctly, “God help me! God help my wife!” he then turned to me (Mr. Mackenzie) and said, “Colin, you are strong, lift me up;” He next said, “Lay me down lower, for I am very low myself, and it suits me to be low.” After this he breathed deeply and slowly, and, with a long look at his wife, passed away.
(4.) Another friend who saw him in his last illness, the Rev. Professor Hort, has summed up his recollections of Maxwell, especially of the graver side of his character, in the following letter:—
From Prof. F. J. A. Hort to Prof. L. Campbell.
Feb. 4, 1882.
It is with extreme regret that I find myself powerless to comply with your request that I should contribute to your Memoir of Professor Maxwell a sketch of his position in reference to theology and religion. A competent and faithful account of Maxwell’s inner thoughts during manhood would for several reasons have been of the highest interest. But his habitual reticence as to all that moved him deeply, and my own bad memory, have together left me without the materials needed for a task in itself most attractive. Though the impression of rare greatness which he left upon me in the first days of our acquaintance became stronger and stronger to the end, I have little to offer but a few vague and scattered reminiscences. Such as they are, I am thankful to be allowed to send them.
My earlier recollections of Maxwell are chiefly associated with a small society at Cambridge to which we both belonged, which used to meet on Saturday evenings for the discussion of literary and speculative questions. The aversion to rhetoric which he found traditional among its members was much to his taste, and he always took an animated and interested part in the conversations. Unfortunately his love of speaking in parables, combined with a certain obscurity of intonation, rendered it often difficult to seize his meaning; but bright and penetrating little sayings, usually whimsical in form, and sometimes accompanied by strange gestures, recurred almost unfailingly at no distant intervals. Whether the tone of his mind was much affected by his participation in our discussions it is difficult to say. During the time that I knew him I can recall no perceptible signs of change other than quiet growth, and suspect that he attained too early and too stable a maturity to receive easily a new direction from any kind of intercourse with his University contemporaries. But it is likely enough that his mind was at least invigorated and consolidated by an influence which others have found reason to count among the strongest and also on the whole most salutary that they have known. The same may probably be said of the influence of Mr. Maurice's writings, which certainly occupied Maxwell at this time. To what extent he was affected by them I do not know; but the tone in which he used to speak of Mr. Maurice leads me to think that they must have at least given him considerable aid in the adjustment and clearing up of his own beliefs on the highest subjects.
My intercourse with Maxwell dropped when we both left Cambridge. When I returned in 1872, after an absence of fifteen years, he had lately been installed at the new Cavendish Laboratory, and I had the happiness of looking forward to a renewal of friendship with him. I found him, as was natural, a graver man than of old; but as warm of heart and fresh in mind as ever. Owing to accidental circumstances on both sides, we met seldomer than I had hoped, though certainly there was no diminution of cordiality on the part of either. Strangely enough, it was again to the meetings of a small society, in purpose not unlike the former, that I owe most of my impressions of Maxwell in these later years. Though he was often unable to attend its meetings, and could rarely stay for more than an hour, he seemed to find much satisfaction in thus joining in the discussion of speculative questions with a few friends, chiefly middle-aged men, representing among them great diversity of studies, and no less diversity of opinion. The old peculiarities of his manner of speaking remained virtually unchanged. It was still no easy matter to read the course of his thoughts through the humorous veil which they wove for themselves; and still the obscurity would now and then be lit up by some radiant explosion.
Perhaps the most noteworthy of Maxwell’s characteristics was his absolute independence of mind, an independence unsullied by conceit or consciousness. Preserved by his simplicity and humility from any fondness for barren paradox, he endeavoured always to see things with his own eyes, without regard to the points of view assumed on one side or another in ordinary controversy: in a word, he was more free from “notionalism” than any one whom I have known. The testimony of his unshaken faith to Christian truth was, I venture to think, of exceptional value on account of his freedom from the mental dualism often found in distinguished men who are absorbed chiefly in physical inquiries. It would have been alien to his whole nature to seclude any province of his beliefs from the free exercise of whatever faculties he possessed; and in his eyes every subject had its affinities with the rest of the universal truth. His strong sense of the vastness of the world not now accessible to human powers, and of the partial nature of all human modes of apprehension, seemed to enlarge for him the domain of reasonable belief. Thus in later years it was a favourite thought of his that the relation of parts to wholes pervades the invisible no less than the visible world, and that beneath the individuality which accompanies our personal life there lies hidden a deeper community of being as well as of feeling and action. But no one could be less of a dreamer, or less capable of putting either fancies or wishes in the place of sober reality. In mind, as in speech, his veracity was thorough and resolute: he carried into every thought a perfect fidelity to the divine proverb which hung beside yet more sacred verses on the wall of his private room, “The lip of truth shall be established for ever.”
During Maxwell’s last illness I had the privilege of enjoying two conversations with him; and not long afterwards I put on paper a short and desultory record of some of his words. These notes contain nothing that might not with propriety be brought under other eyes, and therefore I venture to quote them here. Most of what passed on these two occasions presented nothing worthy of remark, unless it be the cheerful naturalness with which Maxwell spoke on all the varied topics that happened to come up before us. His thoughts had evidently been mainly taking a retrospective direction; and every interest of life seemed to be hallowed and brightened by the probable nearness of the Divine summons to a new form of existence.
He told me briefly the story of his illness; how he had been ailing all the year, but had gone northward after Easter Term without apprehending anything worse than transient ill-health. He had taken with him Professor Clifford’s Lectures and Essays which he had been asked to review. He had read them with close attention for the purpose, and had then, at some time in the summer, prepared to write his criticism. It was a difficult and delicate task, he said, for “there were many things in the book that wanted trouncing, and yet the trouncing had to be done with extreme care and gentleness, Clifford was such a nice fellow.” As soon as he tried to begin, his brain refused its office, and he found himself incapable of composition; and then he knew that his illness had become serious.
Something, I forget what, led the conversation to the perilousness of strong religious excitement in early youth, on account of the spiritual exhaustion and permanent religious insensibility that are apt to follow the dying-out of the original fervour, and that derive a plausible justification from the premature and fallacious experience. He spoke with thankfulness of his own escape from a similar danger. “The ferment,” he said, “about the Free Church movement had one very bad effect. Quite young people were carried away by it; and when the natural reaction came, they ceased to think about religious matters at all, and became unable to receive fresh impressions. My father was so much afraid of this, that he placed me where I should be under the influence of Dean Ramsay, knowing him to be a good and sensible man.
“My father was an advocate. This added much to his usefulness in the country. He was always fond of inventing plans for country houses; his note-books shew that he did this as early as when he was twelve years old. He wanted to build his house on a scale suited to what he thought he would require as sheriff, and had so built a small part of it when he died. We afterwards completed it, as far as possible according to his idea, but on a much smaller scale. He had wished me to be an advocate; but I never attended law classes, as by that time it had already become apparent that my tastes lay in another direction. Moreover, he looked up greatly to James Forbes, and desired that I should be like him. My father died before my marriage, and before I had been actually elected Professor at Aberdeen. He had been greatly interested in the sending in of offers of application. He much wished me to have a Scottish Professorship, that I might have the long vacation free for living at home.
“My interest is always in things rather than in persons. I cannot help thinking about the immediate circumstances which have brought a thing to pass, rather than about any will setting them in motion. What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me. My interest in things has always made me care much more for theology than for anthropology; states of the will only puzzle me. I cannot ascribe so much to a depraved will as some people do, though I do to a certain extent believe in it. Much wrong-doing seems to be no more than not doing the right thing; and that finite beings should fail in that does not seem to need the supposition of a depraved will.” On my saying that, though the immediate cause of the miseries of the world is oftener folly than wickedness, yet men’s folly can frequently be traced back to past misdoing on their part, he warmly assented, and then added in a different strain: “They were foolish because they did not ask for wisdom,—not, of course, absolute wisdom, but the wisdom needed for the moment.
“I have been thinking how very gently I have been always dealt with. I have never had a violent shove in all my life.
“The only desire which I can have is like David to serve my own generation by the will of God, and then fall asleep.”
The unexampled impression which his death produced at Cambridge was due to other causes besides his scientific eminence. Those who lived so near to him, though they saw little of him, could not fail to have some feeling of the man. Some rumours of his wonderful peacefulness in suffering had gone far enough to touch many hearts. And it was a deep and widely-spread emotion which found a voice that Sunday in St. Mary’s Church, through the mouth of one who had known him when both were scholars of Trinity—the Rev. Dr. Butler, the distinguished headmaster of Harrow School:—
It is a solemn thing—even the least thoughtful is touched by it—when a great intellect passes away into the silence, and we see it no more. Such a loss, such a void, is present, I feel certain, to many here to-day. It is not often, even in this great home of thought and knowledge, that so bright a light is extinguished as that which is now mourned by many illustrious mourners, here chiefly, but also far beyond this place. I shall be believed when I say in all simplicity that I wish it had fallen to some more competent tongue to put into words those feelings of reverent affection which are, I am persuaded, uppermost in many hearts on this Sunday. My poor words shall be few, but believe me they come from the heart. You know, brethren, with what an eager pride we follow the fortunes of those whom we have loved and reverenced in our undergraduate days. We may see them but seldom, few letters may pass between us, but their names are never common names. They never become to us only what other men are. When I came up to Trinity twenty-eight years ago, James Clerk Maxwell was just beginning his second year. His position among us—I speak in the presence of many who remember that time—was unique. He was the one acknowledged man of genius among the undergraduates. We understood even then that, though barely of age, he was in his own line of inquiry not a beginner, but a master. His name was already a familiar name to men of science. If he lived, it was certain that he was one of that small but sacred band to whom it would be given to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge. It was a position which might have turned the head of a smaller man; but the friend of whom we were all so proud, and who seemed, as it were, to link us thus early with the great outside world of the pioneers of knowledge, had one of those rich and lavish natures which no prosperity can impoverish, and which make faith in goodness easy for others. I have often thought that those who never knew the grand old Adam Sedgwick and the then young and ever youthful Clerk Maxwell, had yet to learn the largeness and fulness of the moulds in which some choice natures are framed. Of the scientific greatness of our friend we were most of us unable to judge; but any one could see and admire the boy-like glee, the joyous invention, the wide reading, the eager thirst for truth, the subtle thought, the perfect temper, the unfailing reverence, the singular absence of any taint of the breath of worldliness in any of its thousand forms.
Brethren, you may know such men now among your college friends, though there can be but few in any year, or indeed in any century, that possess the rare genius of the man whom we deplore. If it be so, then, if you will accept the counsel of a stranger, thank God for His gift. Believe me when I tell you that a few such blessings will come to you in later life. There are blessings that come once in a lifetime. One of these is the reverence with which we look up to greatness and goodness in a college friend—above us, beyond us, far out of our mental or moral grasp, but still one of us, near to us, our own. You know in part, at least, how in this case the promise of youth was more than fulfilled, and how the man who, but a fortnight ago, was the ornament of the University, and—shall I be wrong in saying it?—almost the discoverer of a new world of knowledge, was even more loved than he was admired, retaining after twenty years of fame that mirth, that simplicity, that childlike delight in all that is fresh and wonderful, which we rejoice to think of as some of the surest accompaniment of true scientific genius.
You know, also, that he was a devout as well as thoughtful Christian. I do not note this in the triumphant spirit of a controversialist. I will not for a moment assume that there is any natural opposition between scientific genius and simple Christian faith. I will not compare him with others who have had the genius without the faith. Christianity, though she thankfully welcomes and deeply prizes them, does not need now, any more than when St. Paul first preached the Cross at Corinth, the speculations of the subtle or the wisdom of the wise. If I wished to show men, especially young men, the living force of the Gospel, I would take them not so much to a learned and devout Christian man, to whom all stores of knowledge were familiar, but to some, country village, where for fifty years there had been devout traditions and devout practice. There they would see the gospel lived out; truths, which other men spoke of, seen and known; a spirit not of this world visibly, hourly present; citizenship in heaven daily assumed, and daily realised. Such characters I believe to be the most convincing preachers to those who ask whether Revelation is a fable, and God. an unknowable. Yes, in most cases,—not, I admit in all,—simple faith, even peradventure more than devout genius, is mighty for removing doubts and implanting fresh conviction. But having said this, we may well give thanks to God that our friend was what he was, a firm Christian believer, and that his powerful mind, after ranging at will through the illimitable spaces of Creation, and almost handling what he called “the foundation stones of the material universe,” found its true rest and happiness in the love and the mercy of Him whom the humblest Christian calls his Father. Of such a man it may be truly said that he had his citizenship in heaven, and that he looked for, as a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the unnumbered worlds were made, and in the likeness of whose image our new and spiritual body will be fashioned.
There was a preliminary funeral ceremony in Trinity College Chapel, where the first part of the Burial Service was read, in the presence of all the leading members of the University. The body was then taken home to Glenlair, and buried in Parton Churchyard, the funeral being attended by numbers of his countrymen from far and near.
In these reminiscences I have purposely abstained as much as possible from comment. But in concluding this portion of the present work, I may be permitted to record a very few general observations or impressions.
The leading note of Maxwell's character is a grand simplicity. But in attempting to analyse it we find a complex of qualities which exist separately in smaller men. Extraordinary gentleness is combined with keen penetration, wonderful activity with a no less wonderful repose, personal humility and modesty with intellectual scorn. His deep reserve in common intercourse was commensurate with the fulness of his occasional outpourings to those he loved. His tenderness for all living things was deep and instinctive; from earliest childhood he could not hurt a fly. Not less instinctive was the sense of equality amongst all human beings, which underlay the plainness of his address. But, on the other hand, his respect for the actual order of the world and for the wisdom of the past, was at least as steadfast as his faith in progress. While fearless in speculation, he was strongly conservative in practice.
In his intellectual faculties there was also a balance of powers which are often opposed. His imagination was in the highest sense concrete, grasping the actual reality, and not only the relations of things. No one was ever more impatient of mere abstractions.[239] Yet few have had so firm a hold upon ideas. Once more, while he was continually striving to reduce to greater definiteness men's conceptions of leading physical laws, he seemed habitually to live in a sort of mystical communion with the infinite.
His aunt, Mrs. Wedderbum, who had the care of him during so much of his early life, said on the occasion of his marriage, “James has lived hitherto at the gate of heaven.”
Mr. Colin Mackenzie has repeated to me two sayings of his during those last days, which may be repeated here—“Old chap, I have read up many queer religions: there is nothing like the old thing after all;” and—“I have looked into most philosophical systems, and I have seen that none will work without a God.”
Maxwell's humour, which with many passed for mere eccentricity, and to some was the characteristic by which he was chiefly known, at least in earlier life, may be passed over lightly here. With strangers it was sometimes the veil of a sensitiveness which but for this would have made him the victim of his immediate surroundings. In confidential intercourse it was a perpetual fund of delight, the vehicle of his exuberant fancy, as it glanced in all directions from the immediate topic of discourse.
It was his way of acknowledging “the grotesque view ”[240] of everything. Like other humourists whom I have known, he was never tired of a joke which had once tickled him; only, if retained in employment, it must always be tricked out with some new livery, and have some fresh turn given to it. As late as the summer of 1879, in writing to Professor Baynes about an article on Chemistry for the Encyclopœdia Britannica, he repeated in some new way the well-worn jest about “an Analyser or a Charlatan.” Even on his deathbed at Cambridge, in familiar converse with his cousin and friend, Mr. Colin Mackenzie, he still used the old quaint familiar speech:—“No, not that phial! the little red-headed chap!”
Nor is it necessary to dwell on the rare freshness of feeling which he carried into middle life. The reader of his correspondence at any period must feel involuntarily that he had “the dew of his youth.”
In thinking of him in college days, I used often to associate him in my own mind with Socrates. There is one point in the resemblance which I had not then realised, the “Socratic strength” of Antisthenes—his extraordinary power of moral and physical endurance.—Once at Cambridge, when his wife was lying ill in her room, and a terrier, who had already shown “a wild trick of his ancestors,” was watching beside the bed, Maxwell happened to go in for the purpose of moving her. The dog sprang at him and fastened on his nose. In order not to disturb Mrs. Maxwell, he went out quietly, holding his arm beneath the creature, which was still hanging to his face.
What had struck me, I suppose, in making the above comparison, was the eager spirit of inquiry beneath the ironical shell. I might have added the union of speculation with mysticism, and of conservatism with progressive thought. But in one essential point, the dialectical cross-questioning method, the analogy fails. For Maxwell had not spent his youth in the Athenian agora, but in the solitudes of Galloway, where he had interrogated Nature more than Man.
In his conversation he might rather be compared with the earlier Greek thinkers, “who,” says Plato, (Soph. 243 B) “went on their several ways, without caring whether they took us with them, or left us behind.” The necessity of utterance was often stronger with him than the endeavour to make himself understood, and he would pour out his ideas in simple affectionateness to those who could not follow them. His thoughts were often tentative, but his expression of them was always dogmatic, even in the negative formula “No one knows what is meant by” so and so.
His indirect, allusive way of speaking was not, however, wilfully assumed, but was the result of idiosyncrasy and early habit; and it disappeared utterly in the presence of any great occasion—a great joy, a great sorrow, or a great duty. Then his speech resolved itself into statements of fact, brief and unemotional, but absolutely simple and direct. And, latterly at all events, such were generally the characteristics of his style in writing. I have been told by Mr. Huddlestone, a late Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, that when consulted about a lightning conductor for King's College Chapel (a building which he greatly loved) Maxwell called and made a verbal explanation which was unintelligible, but in going away he fortunately left a written statement, and this was perfectly clear.
The Galloway boy was in many ways the father of the Cambridge man; and even the “ploys” of his childhood contained a germ of his life-work. Indeed, it may be said that with him, despite the popular adage, “Work when you work,” etc., play was always passing into work and work into play. In twirling his magic discs, his mind was already busied about the cause of optical phenomena. He plied the devil-on-two-sticks with the same eager industry, and with the same simple enjoyment, with which he afterwards spun his dynamical top. And amidst his profoundest investigations, whether about the Rings of Saturn or the Lines of Force, or the molecular structure of material things, the playful spirit of his boyhood was ever ready to break forth. Meanwhile, alike beneath the grave and sparkling mood, a spirit of deep piety pervaded all he did, whether in the most private relations of life, or in his position as an appointed teacher and investigator, or in his philosophic contemplation of the universe. There is no attribute from which the thought of him is more inseparable.
He had keen sympathy with ideal aspirations, together with an occasional sense of their fruitlessness. “It’s no use thinking of the chap ye might have been.” When, in their early married life, Mrs. Maxwell was oppressed with a sense of failure in her first attempts at Cottage-visiting, he made her sit down while he read to her Milton’s sonnet ending with the line, “They also serve, who only stand and wait.”
He appears in early days to have been conscious of some superficial weaknesses, of a certain excitability of temperament, leading to “preconscious states” and preventing him from at once setting himself right in new surroundings; also of the equal danger of shrinking into himself, and “mystifying” those about him. This difficulty, and many others “within and without,” he overcame. But it would be too much to say of him that “his affections never swayed more than his reason,” or that he obtained as firm a foothold in practical life as he had by birthright in the region of scientific thought. This great mass of mind was so delicately hung as to be guided sometimes by a silken thread. Few men, if any, would venture to argue or remonstrate with Maxwell when he had decided on a course of action in the council-chamber of his own breast. But he could not consciously hurt any creature, nor permit the possibility of causing pain to those he loved. Nor was his power over others always adequate to the keenness of his perceptions. For while his penetration often reached the secrets of the heart, his. generosity sometimes overlooked the most obvious characteristics—especially in the shape of mean or vulgar motives.
His liberality, in every sense of the word, was absolute. People have been disposed to criticise the plainness of his entertainments, without knowing that while this was a matter of taste, the difference between the plain and the luxurious table was uniformly dispensed in charity. He has also been supposed by some who think that science should disown religion, to have been intolerant as well as orthodox. The contrary was true. And in particular, the mutual admiration and regard for one another of two such men as Maxwell and Clifford, notwithstanding their profound divergence of opinion on subjects of human interest, deserves to be quoted as an honourable exception to the narrow exclusiveness which has been too prevalent alike in the Christian and the anti-Christian world.[241]
He never sought for fame, but with sacred devotion continued in mature life the labours which had been his spontaneous delight in boyhood. Yet, considering the high region in which he worked, he received a large measure of recognition even in his lifetime. The Rumford Medal, conferred in 1860, was the first of a long list of honours, which up to his last year continued to accumulate from all parts of the civilised world.[242] And some of those who had an eye for genius, though their intellectual interests lay in different spheres from his, could not forbear their testimony. Out of many such expressions it is enough to have selected one. Mr. Frederick Pollock in his work on Spinoza, having occasion to refer to Maxwell’s views on matter and space, adds the following note (p. 115):—
Clerk Maxwell was living when these lines were written: I cannot let them pass through the press without adding a word of tribute to a man of profound and original genius, too early lost to England and to Science.
Great as was the range and depth of Maxwell’s powers, that which is still more remarkable is the unity of his nature and of his life. This unity came not from circumstance, for there were breaks in his outward career, but from the native strength of the spirit that was in him. In the eyes of those who knew him best, the whole man gained in beauty year by year. As son, friend, lover, husband; in science, in society, in religion; whether buried in retirement or immersed in business—he is absolutely single-hearted. This is true of his mental as well as of his emotional being, for indeed they were inseparably blended. And the fixity of his devotion both to persons and ideas was compatible with all but universal sympathies and the most fearless openness of thought. There are no “water-tight compartments,”[243] there is no “tabooed ground;”[244] in spite of much natural reserve, he never really lost his predilection for “a thorough draft.”[245] That marvellous interpenetration of scientific industry, philosophic insight, poetic feeling and imagination, and overflowing humour, was closely related to the profound sincerity which, after all is said, is the truest sign alike of his genius and of his inmost nature, and is most apt to make his life instructive beyond the limits of the scientific world. He would not wish to be set up as an authority on subjects (such as historical criticism) which, however interesting to him, he had not had leisure to study exhaustively. But our age has much to learn from his example. And in his life, regarded as a whole, there is a depth of goodness which can be but faintly indicated in his biography.