Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/203

R. H. Hutton remarked quaintly upon the quantity of 'bottled life' which Huxley could 'infuse into the driest topic on which human beings ever contrived to prose.' A more congenial phrase would perhaps be the amount of 'potential energy' which was always stored in his brain. It is convertible at any moment into the activity of a steam-hammer hitting the nail on the head in the neatest and most effective fashion. There are none of the flabby, tortuous blunderings round about a meaning, nor of the conventional platitudes of which so many letters are entirely composed; every word is alive. His mother, he tells us, was remarkable for rapidity of thought. 'Things flash across me,' she would say by way of apology. That peculiarity, says her son, 'has been passed on to me in full strength'; and though it has 'played him tricks,' there is nothing with which he would less willingly part. The letters often scintillate with such flashes, the brighter for the strong sense of humour which is rarely far beneath the surface. They vary from the simply playful to the earnest moods. He does not scorn even atrocious puns. But of course it is not the occasional condescension to 'goaks,' as he calls them, but the fine perception of the comic side of