Unlike Darwin, to whom scientific research was at length the only thing engrossing enough to make him oblivious of his never-ending ill-health, to the gradual exclusion of other interests, literary and artistic, Huxley never lost his delight in literature or in art.  He had a keen eye for a picture or a piece of sculpture, for, in addition to the draughtsman’s and anatomist’s sense of form, he had a strong sense of colour.  To good music he was always susceptible. (To one breaking in upon him at certain afternoon hours in his room at South Kensington, “a whiff of the pipe” (writes Professor Howes), “and a snatch of some choice melody or a Bach’s fugue, were the not infrequent welcome.”) He played no instrument; as a young man, however, he used to sing a little, but his voice, though true, was never strong.  But he had small leisure to devote to art.  On his holidays he would sometimes sketch with a firm and rapid touch.  His illustrations to the “Cruise of the Rattlesnake” show what his untrained capacities were.  But to go to a concert or opera was rare after middle life; to go to the theatre rarer still, much as he appreciated a good play.  His time was too deeply mortgaged; and in later life, the deafness which grew upon him added a new difficulty.

In poetry he was sensitive both to matter and form.  One school of modern poetry he dismissed as “sensuous caterwauling”:  a busy man, time and patience failed him to wade through the trivial discursiveness of so much of Wordsworth’s verse; thus unfortunately he never realised the full value of a poet in whom the mass of ore bears so large a proportion to the pure metal.  Shelley was too diffuse to be among his first favourites; but for simple beauty, Keats; for that, and for the comprehension of the meaning of modern science, Tennyson; for strength and feeling, Browning as represented by his earlier poems—­these were the favourites among the moderns.  He knew his eighteenth-century classics, but knew better his Milton and his Shakespeare, to whom he turned with ever-increasing satisfaction, as men do who have lived a full life.

His early acquaintance with German had given him a lasting admiration of the greatest representatives of German literature, Goethe above all, in whose writings he found a moral grandeur to be ranked with that of the Hebrew prophets.  Eager to read Dante in the original, he spent much of his leisure on board the “Rattlesnake” in making out the Italian with the aid of a dictionary, and in this way came to know the beauties of the “Divina Commedia”.  On the other hand, it was a scientific interest which led him in later life to take up his Greek, though one use he put it to was to read Homer in the original.

Though he was a great novel-reader, and, as he grew older, would always have a novel ready to take up for a while in the evening, his chief reading, in German and French as well as English, was philosophy and history.